


Drafted

by notenuffcaffeine



Series: Adaptations [3]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, Teen Wolf (TV), The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: ATA Gene, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Sentinels and Guides Are Known, F/M, Full Shift Werewolves, Gen, Government Conspiracy, Hurt Stiles Stilinski, Implied/Referenced Character Death, John Sheppard Whump, M/M, Missions Gone Wrong, Pre-Relationship, Protective Team, SGA: canon pet name, Sentinel Senses, Sentinel/Guide, Slow Burn, Team Feels, Teambuilding, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 50
Words: 245,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23165644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notenuffcaffeine/pseuds/notenuffcaffeine
Summary: When a mission goes badly wrong and the team is stranded on a prison planet MIA for weeks, Sheppard gets back to Atlantis to senses that won't cooperate and a chain of command that won't take any chances. He's sent back to Earth to the Sentinel Project, where the team quickly learns that even missions on Earth can go sideways, too. Especially when Rodney accidentally discovers werewolves.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Jim Ellison & Blair Sandburg, Rodney McKay/John Sheppard, Ronon Dex/Teyla Emmagan
Series: Adaptations [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768660
Comments: 455
Kudos: 506





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *~*~*  
> I haven't written anything in awhile, and then along comes this bug, and somebody told me an impossible thing could be done, so I had to prove them wrong and instead proved them right. It was entirely an accident. That now has over 100 pages burning a hole in my brain. 
> 
> Alternate universe allllll up over this. Takes place after TW s2 and after SGA s2e11 before the whole canon divergence thing happens. References The Sentinel up thru the finale.
> 
> The only other thing I think I need to point out is that I have a bad track record for not leaving dead characters dead or in general killing anybody's darlings, so if there's an implied character death... don't freak out on me. I'll probably surprise you. It's an AU... anything can happen... :)
> 
> *~*~*

_The past is prologue_...

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado - 1999**

The seasoned and enthusiastic members of SG-1 had never been quite so happy to see General George Hammond’s frowning face. The team was quick to march down the ramp, the celebration of surviving their latest mission sneaking out in their smiles.

Well, Samantha Carter and Daniel Jackson wore bright smiles. Jack O’Neill kind of squinted distrustfully around the gate room. And Teal’c was an enigma in sunglasses and an overly colorful bandanna. But Sam knew they were in the right place.

“General! We are going to have some interesting reports for you this week,” Sam told him. She somehow refrained from hugging him. “And I wanted to say, too... Thank you for the assist.”

The General’s eyebrow crawled up a little higher as the frown tugged lower. “I take it there was good news on P3W-451?”

The lightened mood from his lead team disappeared. O’Neill gave a strangled cough.

“Scuse me, sir. But... where was that?” asked Jack.

“P3W-451. Your mission? You’re back early.” The General didn’t seem keen on the sudden mutual confusion all around. It compounded with the confusion he himself felt at seeing his team in neon-accented clothes with fringe and paisley prints right out of the 1960s.

Jack O’Neill nodded his head and took a deep breath. Then he kept walking away from the gate. The Wrong Gate.

“Well, there’s that,” he said, resignation in his tone. Samantha glanced at Daniel, the two exchanging a look after the crushing blow. This wasn’t what was supposed to have happened.

“General. There’s something you need to know,” she began. The man nodded his head.

“A few things, I’m sure. For starters, what happened to your uniforms.”

“1969, uh, happened to them,” offered Daniel. He shuffled uneasily and dragged the bandanna off his head.

“When we last left this room, we were headed to a mission on P2X-555, sir,” Samantha said. “The gate... connected us to the wrong place in time.”

“P3W-451 was the mission quite a while ago, for us,” said O’Neill. He gave a slight shrug as he looked over at Daniel. “Can’t say I’m not glad I don’t have to do that one all over again, though. At least we timed that one right.”

General Hammond seemed to understand the gravity of the mistake even if he didn’t know the full story yet. He motioned toward one of the majors at the door as he took a step back from the group.

“Get yourselves to med bay. Full work ups. And I want individual reports. From everyone. Understood?” It wasn’t really a question, and it was accented by a wave to the ranking officer behind him. And just like that, each member of SG-1 picked up their own armed military escort.

“General-” Jack began, not liking the new shadow already.

“I understand the situation, Colonel, but until I’m certain I have my own people back, your access is restricted,” the General said.

“Sir, I think we are your people, but... something is definitely very wrong,” said Samantha. The General nodded his agreement.

“I have faith you’ll figure it out. And if my team shows up between now and then, we’ll have yet a few more answers,” said Hammond. “In the meantime. After you.”

The General waved toward the doors in open invitation.

“Fall in,” Jack ordered, voice quiet as he moved to keep the General happy. He wasn’t gambling on the existence of another Jack O’Neill queued up just past the gate, one who belonged there after having completed the mission to P3W-451.

“What happened?” Daniel asked, a whisper in the hallway as he walked beside Samantha.

“I - I don’t know. It was supposed to work,” said Sam.

“Alternate reality?” Daniel was thinking out loud. “Or is this another time glitch? At least we’re in the right place to get some answers this time.”

“I’ll run some tests. It just - I don’t know why it didn’t work, so I don’t know where - or when - we are,” she said. The exhaustion pulled on her shoulders and her spirit. Daniel set a hand to her arm, a simple reminder the team was still in it together.

“P3W-451,” said Jack just ahead of them. “The whole gravity-sucking time-glitching Mercury Retrograde on steroids fiasco is the _when_ , folks.” He didn’t sound exactly happy to have gotten a few weeks added back to the lifespan. “We missed our window. That’s all.”

Sam nodded absently. “We’ll figure it out later.”

General Hammond kept them under guard when on base for a month after their arrival. They could wander between certain areas, as long as they had their appointed shadow guard with them, and Sam was allowed in the labs to continue certain time-sensitive projects, but never past the front gates. The SG1 team wasn't allowed out among the American people again for two months, even though Hammond permitted them to go on off-world missions, as tests.

It curbed their scheduled missions and set them as a back-up team until Hammond was positive they were, in fact, his team. Hammond had no recollection of events in 1969, but other pieces lined up. Other pieces, like the SG1 mission reports, were in the wrong place, or in some cases, missing entirely, even though Carter and her team still remembered writing them.

And through all of her tests and simulations and computer modules with the extra lab time, Sam Carter was certain they had ended up mostly where they wanted to be. They were in the right timeline. But despite their best efforts, something had changed before they could get back.

Somewhere on P3W-451, a butterfly had flapped its wings at a stargate and that simple draft managed to rewrite thirty years of human history back on Earth.

*~*~*

**Earth: Cascade, Washington - 1999**

The body lying in the fountain had to be some kind of joke. It was too public. It was too noisy. The glare off the water was too bright. It couldn’t be legit.

But no matter how much Jim Ellison tried to assure himself that his senses had found a new way to go haywire after so long, the body in the fountain was very real.

And very much Jim’s fault.

He would later remember very little about crossing the courtyard, or how exactly his friend had been pulled from the water. It would be the barely 30 year old face of his annoying best friend staring up at him, not breathing, eyes half closed, mouth half open. That would stick out in his memory forever. Blair Sandburg wasn’t supposed to bail on Jim, and instead, Jim had bailed on him. And he got the kid killed.

No amount of military training could make it past the shock Jim had felt then. He zoned on listening for a heartbeat that was so familiar, and yet it wasn’t there now even when he could see the face of the man it belonged to. Precious seconds were lost. Maybe minutes, Jim couldn’t tell and would never remember.

He made it through the zone to bright white. Flashes of blue broke through in streaks, like water blasted away by wind. The blue and white framed the watchful eyes of a familiar timber wolf as the split-second of awareness returned. Blair’s face showed up, still dead, and the wolf’s eyes blazed through him.

The roaring hiss of a panther added to the sensory overload. Jim saw the jaguar a heartbeat before it pounced. He felt it jump through him, felt it take his breath, felt it push him to turn, unsteady on his feet. Jim watched as the jaguar and the wolf collided in midair, brilliant light spilling everywhere over the dead body of Blair Sandburg.

“Ellison!”

The shout brought Jim back to life, his senses faded to something more like normal as the shock traded off for adrenaline.

“Let them work, damnit, Jim...”

The rumbling voice of his captain, Simon Banks, was close and Jim realized Simon was holding him back. Keeping him away from Blair because the EMT’s were doing their best to bring him back.

“He’s dead, Simon. I - He’s dead,” said Jim.

“Let them work,” Simon said again. It was an order through clenched teeth. The command made it through and Jim went still, waiting, watching, and listening. He eased away from Simon, holding his own again. Simon kept a firm hold on his arm, just in case.

A small sound kept him back, too. Something he wasn’t sure he had heard. With the distance, he saw it. There, between breaths from the EMT providing CPR, was the smallest natural movement.

When the EMT went to resume compressions, Jim pulled away from Simon to stop the medics. Simon scrambled to keep his hold.

“Wait! He’s breathing! Look!” Jim pointed at Blair, because that was the only useful action he could take.

He saw Blair’s chest rise and fall again as the EMTs checked again to verify their patient was breathing. It took them a moment to find the heartbeat, but Jim could already hear it.

Blair was barely there, but he was alive.

The EMTs rolled Blair to his side as the water came back up. Jim watched and listened as the heartbeat raced back to life.

Later, the estimate came in that Blair had been without oxygen for over five minutes. They didn’t have an exact time frame to work with, only the time of the calls into the 911 switchboard and the response logs from the closest ambulance station.

And Jim marveled that his friend made it through, even as he cursed the fact that Blair Sandburg used his brilliant brain to make Jim’s life hell, with all the dumb jokes and bad ideas that Blair would ramble on about, day in and day out.

And the day Blair’s Sentinel research became public, Jim saw a shade of the same lifelessness take over Sandburg again. Something bigger than either of them hit the entire Cascade Police Department as journalists from around the country called in to ask Simon Banks what kind of nutjobs he had patrolling the city. As Jim’s arrest and conviction record became more widely known, the questions changed.

“ _What kind of threat does this sentinel genetic trait pose to everyday citizens?_ ”

And Jim watched from the sidelines as Internal Affairs spent the next two years reopening every case. He was put on desk duty just so they could always reach him. Blair’s expected semester with the police academy was dead in the water. No one wanted to work with a crazy kid pushing science fiction, and no one wanted spied on if the stuff in the thesis about Jim Ellison turned out to be true.

But when all the shouting was done, Jim’s friend, brother, and Guide was at least safe. He was alive and breathing. He could still teach. Maybe the pair of them were a little strapped for cash under the lawyers’ bills, but life went on.

1999 was one hell of a year.

*~*~*

**Earth: Cascade, Washington - 2003**

The new class was sharp. It was nice to have a group of people who wanted to show up to lectures again. Sure, some of the questions were dumb, but they came from kids who didn’t know any better. Some of those kids were maybe only five years younger than their instructor, but Blair Sandburg still gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Anthropology wasn’t exactly an easy subject, and Blair was teaching the beginning course load again. Most of his students now would never go out on a dig, had no interest in the real world experience of the study, but they could make the connections to the results in the process. It made lectures a lot easier, even if he ended up fielding a lot of questions about statistics.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of math majors this semester.

Blair collected the stack of term papers off the corner of the desk and made room for the batch at the back of his overburdened backpack. He followed the last student out of the hall, hitting the light switch as he passed. He walked off in the vague direction of his office, not fully paying attention as he fished in his backpack pockets for his Blackberry. Even as he did, he felt the phone start to vibrate from an incoming call, which made it much easier to find.

“Sandburg,” he said in greeting. He realized idly that he had spent too much time around his roommate.

“Yeah, I know,” came Jim’s voice over the line. He didn’t sound quite normal, but Blair couldn’t tell if the flat sarcasm was from anger or stress. Probably both. His roommate wasn’t the best at playing nice.

“Jim? What’s wrong, man?” asked Blair.

“Look, when are you home?” Jim replied. He didn’t seem interested in the answer. “Can you cut out the rest of the day?”

Blair glanced at the phone to make sure he knew the time. Just after noon on a Tuesday.

“Sure. I mean, I’ve got another class at four, but I can - What’s going on? Why?” he asked.

“Somebody just - A Colonel Glass just showed up here. I’ve been reassigned to active duty.”

Blair tripped over his feet as he walked, surprised at the news. “Reactivated? What? Jim, man, don’t take this the wrong way, but you are too old...”

“Trust me, I know, Chief. But he handed me the paperwork personally. Face to face. Glass knows how old I am,” Jim assured him.

“Well, did he say why?”

“Yeah. That’s why you need to wrap it up and get home,” said Jim. He wasn’t messing around.

“What? You were the one to get the papers. I have never and will never sign up for that shit,” Blair said.

“Sandburg. They classified your research. The Sentinel stuff. It didn’t go away like we thought it did. It just... disappeared.”

At that, Blair stopped dead in his tracks. He stared blankly at the campus bell tower, mentally stuck. “What.”

“Glass said I was on medical release after the stuff in Peru. Not discharged. Says that’s why I’ve had all the trouble with the VA the last ten years,” said Jim. The report was not a welcome one and everything about his friend’s voice told Blair it was all bullshit. A made-up paper-trail to snare Jim back into the fold.

“Okay. So... I need to call the Dean. Let him know all the stuff from my thesis is going to hit the school again,” said Blair, thinking out loud as he tried to figure out how to minimize the damage that was on the way. If they had reached out to Jim after all this time, there was something big coming.

“No,” said Jim firmly. “You need to get your ass back home so I know where you are. Until something about this makes some kind of sense, you need to keep your head down.”

Blair slowly registered the order and changed course. He turned away from the campus to head back to his car instead. “Right. I’m going to my car. I’ll... call the Dean later.”

“Good. If you’re not back here in ten, I call Simon,” said Jim.

“Should I just wait for an escort home then?” Blair was only half-joking.

“No. Take 4th and Highland, it’ll be faster. And you’ll be fine.”

Being distracted by the phone was making Blair nervous, so he promised to take the right route home and hurried to put the Blackberry back in his bag. He kept his eyes open on the walk back to his car, searched every face, even checked rooftops for watchers or snipers. Everything seemed like a normal, semi-sunny day in Cascade. Maybe Jim Ellison was just a paranoid cop. The theory didn’t make Blair feel any better.

Sandburg had his keys in hand as he approached his car. He was almost to the safe zone. As long as he ignored the number of times his car had been wired to explode. He was just three steps from home-free.

“Dr. Sandburg?” someone asked as Blair tried to open his car door. Blair looked over at the source, a younger man standing between his car and the next, blocking the aisle. Not a good sign. He also wore a uniform, with an MP badge on the arm. Definitely not a good sign.

“Yeah, that’s me,” said Blair, cautious. Like magic, three other military uniforms showed up at various places around his car as Blair looked around. “What’s up?”

“Dr. Sandburg, please leave your keys in the car door, and place your bag on the roof,” said the MP. This was definitely not anything protocol.

“Why?” asked Blair.

“We’ve been tasked to bring you to the base, Dr. For your safety and ours, do as you are asked. Everything will be returned to you later.”

The young man knew he was out of his jurisdiction and was being polite. Following orders, but still a polite, human response to the impossibility of the request. Blair could have jumped the hood of his car and made a run for the train station, and he would probably be allowed to survive calling them on their bullshit. In theory.

But he wasn’t sure what would happen if he got away, either. Blair had a life he wanted to get back to, as quickly and carefully as possible.

Instead, Sandburg held up his hands and shrugged his backpack up onto the car hood. “Am I under arrest?”

The MP nodded slightly.

“For what?” Blair pressed.

“Selling state secrets. The full charges will be handled on base, sir, but that is what I have been authorized to report,” said the young officer. He was very polite about checking Blair for weapons. The worst Blair carried on him was a Swiss Army Knife in his backpack, and Blair cautiously advised the MPs of it, just to be sure he wasn’t accused of hiding it from them later. And he didn’t want to be handcuffed on campus, so maybe they would work with him if he cooperated.

When the big, black, state-exempt SUV rolled up behind Blair’s car, he was loaded into the backseat. In handcuffs. Under the watchful eye of at least twenty current and former students. Someone from the group yelled out, “But when do we get our term papers back?”

Oh yeah. There was no way the university would ever let Blair teach again. The Sentinel problem was definitely going to leave a mark this time.


	2. Chapter 2

_And thus it begins..._

  
**Pegasus Galaxy: Atlantis - 2012**

There was nothing redeemable about prison planets. Even the most innocent people among their population became the problem eventually, and John Sheppard had lost all tolerance and hope after nearly two weeks of high school level politics being used to determine the fate, health, and sanity of his team.

He had long ago decided that, given the chance to rule a galaxy, any galaxy, should the opportunity ever arrive, every prison planet would be sucked into a black hole. _Boom_. Problem solved.

It got a little sketchy around the topic of Earth, but it was John’s revenge fantasy, and he didn’t have to make it logical or morally sound just yet. He could worry about that when he got home. Or sooner, if an ascended ancient felt in the mood to grant him galaxy-destroying powers before Sheppard could get to the gate. He wasn’t gonna be picky about it, anyway.

For now, Sheppard was only responsible for three people, and one of them was himself, so prison planets everywhere could all breathe easy. He couldn’t, but they could.

“What’s happened? What’s wrong?” came Rodney’s voice to interrupt his contemplation of the fate of the universe. McKay probably thought he was whispering, but it sounded like he was talking loudly. John looked over, surprised to see the scientist still across the room from him.

“Nothing happened. Everything is wrong,” he replied easily.

“Well, I know that,” complained McKay.

“He means your breathing,” said Ronon. “Your chest is... whistling.”

Sheppard coughed and shrugged it off. “I’m fine. It just reeks in here.”

“Dust. I smell dust,” said McKay. “ _Rock_ dust. And mold. Which, of course, I’m allergic to.” McKay’s observation was accented by an appropriately timed sneeze.

“I smell mold and rotted... something. That I won’t be contemplating anymore, so give it up,” said Sheppard. He grudgingly admitted that breathing hurt, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “Let’s just find our stuff and get the hell out of here.”

Their stuff was somewhere in a walled off section of the cave that served as the hidden and secure base of operations for the people in charge of the mines. The locals called them the Daturan, Sheppard just called them assholes. But he couldn’t breathe quite right, so he was a little cranky.

Either way, the Daturan weren’t there to babysit their stuff at the moment, their attention diverted by a riot currently taking up at least half a continent. It had taken nearly all day to get this far, and now John was staring at a small mountain of stolen belongings, with his team’s gear somewhere in the mix.

“Is anyone else hungry?” McKay asked. He answered himself like an echo. “I’m hungry.”

“Find our gear and I’ll share my MREs,” Sheppard promised. He picked a random point in the pile and started carefully moving things aside, one by one. Ronon found another spot to do the same.

“Can I still eat if I just... Stand here and hold the torch as you both look?” Rodney asked. He wasn’t trying to whine for once, but there was a timidness that was hard to ignore. “My shoulder -”

John swore under his ragged breath. He had forgotten about the burn from the fight the day before. Either Rodeny had been amazingly quiet on the topic, or Sheppard was way too distracted to have missed hearing the complaining that had probably been happening all day.

“Yeah, Rodney. That works. Help Ronon. I can see fine over here,” said Sheppard.

“How?” McKay asked. John paused, looked over his shoulder at Rodney.

“You’re worse than a five-year old sometimes, you know that? Can we do _less_ with the science questions and _more_ with the finding our GDOs?”

McKay seemed to get on board with the plan again, refocused on his task rather than the exhausted insult from Sheppard. It somehow wasn’t surprising and John returned to the search.

If it looked like a weapon, he set it aside so they could carry it out with them.

If it looked like a shirt or a jacket in reasonable condition, he checked it over before dismissing it. His shirt had more holes in it than swiss cheese after the first week in the labor camp and the cave was cold. Ronon and Rodney seemed fine, but McKay was damaged and Ronon was... well, Ronon.

If it looked technological, organic, or alive, John left it where it was. On this planet, there were a few things that looked like all three at once.

“When we get home, I’m gonna send a nuke back through to destroy that gate,” he announced as he sidestepped a particularly nasty looking chunk of slimy metal that seemed to be breathing. McKay seemed to be thinking it over a short time before he finally nodded.

“Yeah. I’m okay with that.”

“And from now on, we scout with a jumper before we send in teams. Anywhere. At all,” Sheppard added. “ _Cloaked_ jumpers.”

McKay nodded ready agreement again and then winced at an unfortunate memory. “I miss the jumpers. Zelenka better not have screwed with the mainframe while I was gone. He said he wanted to get more speed, but I refused. The coding never worked out. Elizabeth wouldn’t have let him go around me while I was gone, right? How long-”

“Found it!” Sheppard didn’t bother to wait out McKay rambling because it would have gone on forever. It was actually kind of helpful, giving him something to focus on besides the dark as they searched. And, at least this one time, it worked.

John held up his jacket to show what he had found. Ronon took a few long strides and was soon helping to unbury the rest of the gear. Rodney was a little slower with the torch, and it wasn’t until the light got closer that John realized how dark it had been. He looked down at the light splashed over his boots, surprised by the suddenly obvious shadows.

Huh.

He let it go and hauled a pack up from the floor with a Canadian flag patch. He held it out toward McKay. “This yours?”

Rodney didn’t usually have a lot of color to him, but the man went suddenly very pale.

“Uh. No. That’s... well, that’s Hart’s.”

John’s good mood faded. He shouldered the pack and dug around for the next one. A few feet away, Ronon found his favorite gun and holster. He came up beaming, a satisfied sigh escaping before he got back to work.

It did feel good to have his own stuff back, but Lt. Col. Sheppard felt the extra weight of Aubrey Hart’s gear as they made their way back out of the Daturan storage caves. He could breathe a little easier, less burning in his lungs. Maybe things were looking up, but he still had two men to get back to the gate. And that was at least three klicks away. They had been at the caves for the day, so who knew where the fighting had gone.

Before they reached the way out, Sheppard stopped and transferred his MREs and weapons, a few other maybe-needed things out of his bag to the front pockets of Hart’s gear bag. He left the extra pack at the cave gates, the American flag from his pack ripped off and shoved in his inside jacket pocket.

*~*~*

The DHD was fortified by a team of Daturans. Because it was a _prison planet_ , and they who control the gate control the prisoners. And that? That was what made them _assholes_.

The Daturan didn’t even live on the planet, they just found the gate a thousand years earlier, knew how to use it, and have ever since used it for the mines and the open land for dumping prisoners. There were more Daturan prisoners on the small continent with the gate than there were people native to the planet. See? Assholes. It was going in Sheppard’s report.

Between the lucky existence of Ronon Dex and the small armory of weapons they had found in the storage cave, it wasn’t that difficult to get to the walled off perimeter of the blockade that surrounded the stargate. The hardest part was the terrain after the last two weeks on their feet. It was a long walk through a half-burned valley.

There weren't a lot of other stragglers headed for the gate yet. Most of the area had been burned out, and the only bodies they found were dead fighters who hadn’t escaped the fire. The fire stopped at the stone walls of the blockade, and from the looks of it, the Daturans had left behind a team to defend the gate inside.

The riot had started days earlier, and the aimless fighting had driven many of the Daturan taskmasters and fighters to safer ground, toward the ocean, from what Sheppard had picked up. The prisoners didn’t care who they fought, so long as they made noise, stole weapons, and set fire to anything that could hide a Daturan. It was unpredictable and unorganized, the last rage of desperate men more than a rebellion, with little planning beyond a coordinated day to start the fighting passed from camp to camp, mine to mine.

Sheppard and his men had stayed out of the rumored plans for rebellion. They had already lost Hart by then, and Sheppard saw a rebellion as nothing more than a chance to get back to the gate.

Sheppard, Dex, and McKay had gotten too close to it the night before, getting only momentarily caught up in a skirmish that hadn’t moved on yet. In the smoke and the dark, McKay had run into someone, seeing a shadow he thought was Ronon. It got him shoved against a burning tree, held there until Ronon did find him. The only killing Ronon did for the rebellion’s favor was in defense of his teammate. Not bad for two days of traveling the wrong direction against a fight.

Now the small team faced an eight man Daturan resistance inside the stone walls that surrounded the stargate. Rodney wasn’t exactly in fighting shape, so he waited on the hill above the blockade that they had used to scout for intel. That put their current odds at two against eight.

Sheppard had a recently-renewed hate-rage going, and Ronon had his own anger issues to work out, so John figured it was hardly fair. They would burn through the Daturans like jet fuel. They just needed a solid plan to light the match. Or luck.

Luck would do the trick.

The gates opened to let the Daturans out while Sheppard and Ronon crouched alongside. Until the doors opened, they had been looking for handholds on the stone to climb. Now they were perfectly hidden as the Daturans marched forth, and a far better opportunity presented itself.

Sheppard exchanged a look with Ronon, smug disbelief on their faces. The Lt. Colonel motioned for his field second to wait on his signal. They moved to get a better view around the swing of the open doors. John had counted eight soldiers from their recon up on the hill, so they would wait for all eight soldiers to leave. Sheppard was not above the opportunity for a shooting gallery.

“Hey!”

The shout came from the rise of the hill, straight ahead of the doors into the Daturan blockade. Not far from where they had left Rodney McKay. And of course, there on the hill, stood the ragged scientist, using burned out trees as potential concealment, stripes of charcoal and ash all over what wasn’t already bloody. He had probably fallen a few times since Sheppard had seen him last.

It had the Daturans’ attention. The troops went from moving out for a hike to weapons raised and aimed. At Rodney. Shit. That wasn’t helpful.

Sheppard moved quickly to take aim, staying low as he hurried forward to the edge of the stone slab door he and Ronon were using for cover. Up on the hill, McKay waved his uninjured arm over his head, just to be sure he had the bad guys’ thorough attention.

“Now.” Sheppard’s quiet warning was enough and Ronon stepped out from the door. They fired simultaneous shots, taking down the men at the front of the small company first. Rodney hit the deck to remove himself as a target once the bullets started flying. Electric darts in the case of the weird Daturan weapons. Even from across the hillside clearing, Sheppard easily heard the clumsy “ow-ow-ow!” from McKay.

Another four men went down in short order. Sheppard had to divide his attention between the fight and the hill. Rodney had a weapon, but there was no guarantee he was in condition to use it, and Sheppard’s only other backup was happily making enough noise to raise the dead as he put a few more men down. They were going to be noticed, if there was anyone in the area to notice them.

“You want the last two?” Sheppard shouted at Ronon.

“My pleasure,” the big man said, offering a wide smile to prove it. He held his gun in one hand and a knife in the other as he moved to attack the coward Daturans who had retreated back inside the blockade walls.

Sheppard waved up at McKay, calling him down from the hillside. Then he moved to the inside edge of the door so he could check on Ronon’s fight while keeping an eye on their teammate.

There was a lot of information to process, splitting his attention like that. Six men sprawled out, not twenty yards away from him, all in various stages of dying, or already dead. Sheppard tried to point McKay away from taking the direct route, but he didn’t seem to understand. As long as he didn’t run through the group and try walking on bodies, they would all be okay.

The squawk of a bird sounded loud in his ears, like the bird had yelled at him from no further away than his shoulder. Sheppard turned to look and nothing was there. A shape out in the sky looked like it might be a bird, he just couldn’t get a good look at it. When he tried to focus, he instead saw black.

John froze up. He was aware that he couldn’t move, could hardly think. But he could count the follicles on the shaft of the bird’s feathers. Found the bird. Definitely found the bird. Now he just had to figure out how to get the hell away from it.

“What? What do you see?”

Rodney’s voice interrupted an eerie silence that made no sense. There had been noise. Sheppard had been watching a fight, fights had noise. Now all he heard was McKay. That had to be an improvement over nothing. Sheppard moved his head and he could even see again. Everything was back to normal.

And McKay was suddenly right in front of him, no longer somewhere up the hill. When did that happen? Why were they still standing there? McKay frowned at him.

“You just did the breathing thing-” he began. Sheppard cut him off by catching his uninjured shoulder and pushing him back toward the stargate.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Let’s close the doors and get the hell out of here, huh?”

Sheppard tugged one of the stone doors closed as Ronon dragged the two Daturans he had dispatched out into the clearing through the other. Rodney moved to the DHD and started dialing out as Sheppard helped Ronon close and brace the door. It wasn’t much, the walls were climbable, but it bought them a few minutes breathing room in case they needed it. As Sheppard dug into the pack for a radio mic, the stargate whooshed to life in front of Rodney. Two weeks out and the damn radio still had battery life. It crackled and snapped as he set the unit over his ear.

“Command, come in,” he called into the mic.

“Lt. Colonel Sheppard? Is that you?” came Elizabeth Weir’s suspicious voice through the comm.

“Yeah. I’ve got three to come home, Director. Please,” he replied. For the first time in his career, he found it a little hard to control his voice. It had been a hard few weeks.

“Granted. Home is waiting, Colonel.”

McKay and Dex hadn’t bothered with their radios, they just stood in front of the gate, waiting for Sheppard to give the all-clear. He waved them on and watched to be sure they both disappeared over the horizon before stepping through himself.

He would assemble the nuke himself, the second he got back to Atlantis.  
  


*~*~*


	3. Chapter 3

**Earth: Beacon Hills, California**

After the blow up at the sheriff's station, it took Stiles Stilinski three days to get the combination of kanima poison and the hunters’ drugs out of his system. He was able to talk and walk and think, but he was tired, he was in a major state of shock, and he felt basically none of it. Blood tests at the hospital said he was on enough ketamine to knock down a horse, and the techs couldn’t identify the other stuff in the mix, but he kept putting one foot in front of another. Hopefully it didn’t kill him. People talked to him, or about him, and he talked back.

Except when he couldn’t.

No one would believe him if he told them that his former best-friend conspired with the principal of the high school to lead a full-on assault of the sheriff’s department. No one would believe him if he said it was partially arranged by a group of fanatics who hunted people for fun and called it the family legacy.

And no one would believe that something Scott McCall was involved in would have left Stiles blissed out on a veterinarian-grade painkiller that should have killed him, or that the angelic son of an FBI agent could possibly have anything to do with the death of Sheriff Noah Stilinski.

Actual death.  
Real death.  
As in, the kind he wouldn’t be coming back from.

It took three full days for the weight of that to hit Stiles because of the werewolf drugs his scrawny non-werewolf ass had been shot with. His dad was gone. Just so Scott could try to outsmart some hunters. He got what he wanted, they got what they wanted, and Stiles’ lost his dad in trade.

When it all finally hit Stiles, he had been sitting on Melissa McCall’s couch, arguing with her about the hospital and social services and her taking guardianship of him for another two years, until he was eighteen. She had offered. But she didn’t know what Scott had done. She was barely even talking to Scott herself just then. And Stiles couldn’t tell her. He didn’t have words anyone would believe.

Instead, he walked out of her house, his former best friend’s house, and smashed his cell phone on the sidewalk. To bits and pieces. Because he knew he wasn’t strong enough to do that to Scott’s face. And he wouldn’t be capable of explaining that to Scott’s mom, either.

It didn’t help that he then spent the next twenty four hours locked up in the Argents’ basement because Gerard Argent was an asshole and a psychopath who thought Stiles still knew anything at all about his friends, two of whom the old man had trussed up with jumper cables with him. Stiles knew less than they did. He told Gerard that. And then he got dumped in the woods at night to find his way home when he had no home to go to anymore at all.

So Stiles had gone to Derek Hale instead.

“Bite me,” he had demanded. Because he was stupid, and grieving, and even every part of his body hurt. Derek just stared at him. So Stiles pushed him, as hard as he could. “Come on. Bite me. I need to break Scott’s face. Help me.”

“That won’t help you, Stiles,” Derek said. He seemed to understand, but he didn’t like it when Stiles tried to push him again. He caught Stiles by the arm to hold him back and away, out of shoving distance.

“Then you break his face for me.”

Derek shook his head. “Also won’t help.”

“Well, _do_ something!”

Derek stared at him again, anger edging under the confusion. “Why the hell would I? Scott’s spent the last year trying to hand me over to the hunters, or to the feds. I could have told you something like this would happen. I tried.”

“Yeah, but not like this, man,” Stiles said. He was probably crying, but he still couldn’t quite tell. “This was my dad. All I got left was him. I already buried my mom and now I gotta - I gotta bury what’s left of my dad. Wasn’t much.” Stiles knew there were tears happening and swiped at his face. “I think she said the service is on Wednesday.”

The damndest thing happened then. Derek, the tough alpha, cool guy werewolf, relaxed his hold on Stiles’ arm, no longer trying to hold him off. Instead he gave a barely noticeable tug, to let Stiles stand closer again.

And then he let the annoying, embarrassing, crying mess of a teenager lean sideways to claim comfort because he could suddenly feel all of the pain, after three days of nothing. Stiles probably would have killed Isaac or the others if they had showed up then to get on his case about it. But it helped for a minute.

Stupid Derek Hale wouldn’t bite him, or fight his battles for him, but he became Stiles’ new best friend just for trying to help keep Stiles alive. And he kept trying over the next few months as Stiles was kicked from foster shelter to foster home to former teachers’ houses for couch-surfing. Derek let him leave his stuff at the loft when Derek finally told him the place existed. He kept track of Stiles and gave him a place to run to, as long as none of the hunters caught him there. The hunters still wanted Derek Hale’s head on a pike, and Derek still had to deal with Scott and his new True Alpha super powers or whatever - Stiles didn’t even want to know anymore - so Stiles was very careful.

And it worked out okay, Stiles was trying to figure things out day by day on his own. He was mostly werewolf-free except for Derek’s treating him like an unofficial part of his struggling pack. Derek hadn’t seen Erica and Boyd in months, and Isaac was playing both sides with Scott, so Stiles stayed out of it.

No werewolf stuff shoved in his face every five minutes, no stupid Shakespearean girlfriend dramas, no death threats because he opened his mouth. Derek had a tough time with it, but he never made it Stiles’ problem like Scott did.

Everything almost worked by the time Stiles had to go back to school.

Until his new social worker decided she didn’t like Stiles’ habit of not showing up to classes, and not staying with the good people she found for him to stay with. Stiles was 90% certain two of them had been hunters, so _hell no_ , he wasn’t staying where she wanted him to. But he couldn’t tell her that, either.

So three months after his dad died, the social worker packed him up and moved him from the place he found for himself. Again.

All suspicions were confirmed when the car pulled up to a familiar house in a familiar neighborhood.

“Here we go,” said his social worker. He was very intentionally trying not to remember her name because she was clearly not a real human. Just a hunter pawn in a social worker’s pantsuit.

“Nope,” Stiles said. “I can’t stay here.”

“Why not.”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not.”

“Because of reasons.”

The social worker sighed and thumped her head back against the headrest. “The same reasons you can’t stay at the McCall place?”

Stiles looked at her sharply. “Exact same fucking reasons,” he said. The woman snapped her fingers at him.

“Watch your language, Stiles,” she said. Stiles, for once in his recently miserable life, welcomed the order to stop talking. He slunk lower in the seat and wished for the hundredth time he still had his car. His dad died without a will, so it would be years before Stiles could access anything from the estate, and by then the Jeep would be long gone. Foster kids probably weren’t allowed to drive anyway, he reasoned miserably.

So Stiles sat outside the home of Chris and Victoria Argent, heirs-apparent to the Beacon Hills, California, Hunters Hobby Club.

Nope.

“Come on. Get out of the car,” said Social Worker Pantsuit. “The Argents asked to help. They said their daughter was a friend of yours.”

“No, Allison is a friend of Scott’s,” Stiles clarified, because that was a very important factor also.

“Well, maybe now she can be yours, too,” the woman said. She got out of the car and pulled the suitcases and Stiles’ pillow out of the trunk. Stiles sat up, panicked, as his pillow was hostaged behind enemy lines. Chris Argent stood in the driveway to accept Stiles’ stuff. He waited for Stiles to get out of the car.

Instead, Stiles slowly snuck his hand out to lock himself in the car. Pantsuit had left her keys in the ignition, so Stiles was proud of himself for the accomplishment.

After a minute or so, Chris Argent walked over and crouched in front of the door. He met Stiles eye to eye through the window.

Finally, he said, “If you want answers, you’ll have to go inside.”

Stiles’ smug attachment to his weak rebellion slowly faded as Argent lobbed the bait smack into his forehead.

What answers? To which questions?

It had been months since Stiles had been around Scott and the others. The only answer he needed had been provided for him by life: the people he thought were his friends really weren’t at all. Case closed. There were a lot fewer questions in general since then.

So what answers did Argent still have for him then?

Shit.

Nervous, paranoid curiosity got the best of him, and Stiles reached for the door handle to let himself out. He could stay until he had answers, and then he could just leave again. Problem solved, win/win.

Argent held the door open for him. Stiles felt like a dead man walking as he moved up to the front door. He remembered quite clearly being dragged through the garage and down the basement steps months earlier. This time, he walked himself through the front door. He helpfully handed Pantsuit the keys she had left in the car, but she didn’t seem impressed.

“You try this. And I’ll check in with you in a few days, to be sure you’re settled in. Alright?” she asked. Stiles nodded vaguely, looking around the house instead.

“Whatever.”

And then Pantsuit left him there. Stiles held on to his backpack strap for dear life, waited for the hunters to pounce. He watched Argent close for the warning signs.

“She said she’s going to check up on me,” he warned. “Means you can’t leave bruises this time.”

Chris Argent stood four feet away and frowned at him. “We’re trying to help, Stiles,” he said.

“I don’t need your help,” said Stiles.

“Why? You think Derek Hale will help you?” Chris Argent shook his head. “We still don’t know who killed my sister, and Hale nearly killed my wife three months ago. You need to pick your friends better, kid. They’re all gonna get you killed, too.”

“Yeah, and she’s fine now,” said Stiles, bitterly. “And Scott’s not the one who blew up my dad.”

That struck a nerve and Argent actually stepped closer. Stiles almost worried he was going to push the man into a fight, which became a problem considering Argent was a gun dealer and Stiles didn’t even carry a knife. His life would have been so much better if Derek had just bit him when he’d asked, damnit.

“It wasn’t me either. Otherwise, I promise you, you wouldn’t be standing here,” said Chris. Stiles didn’t have any trouble believing him on that admission at least. He stayed quiet rather than push further, not sure what to say or do to avoid becoming mince meat or werewolf bait, either one. The silence dragged on. Argent finally caught his arm and pushed him toward the stairs. “Your room is up there.”

“You promised me answers,” Stiles replied, tugging his arm free without trouble.

“Yes, and a roof over your head, and food. And supplies to switch your classes to online-only so you don’t drop out,” said Chris. “One thing at a time.”

“Is this some kind of apology or something?” Stiles asked, as bitter as he was confused now. “You think I’m gonna tell people what really happened or something? Is this a bribe?”

“No. This is just being human,” Chris told him. He stopped in front of a door and waved Stiles inside. It wasn’t a jail cell at least. That was promising. Stiles’ stuff was already waiting by the closet doors. At least, the stuff he didn’t have stashed at Derek’s place. The stuff he wouldn’t mind losing if he had to run for good. Stiles stared blankly around the room.

“You are welcome to stay with us, Stiles. This was Allison’s idea. She said you and Scott hadn’t talked in months and this... this isn’t a good time to be on your own. My family didn’t want to see anything happen to your dad, or you. This is the best we can do to keep you safe now,” Argent said. He probably meant it, too. Stiles didn’t exactly speak the same language as Allison Argent, but he had at least figured out she was a good person.

Stiles closed his fingers around the phone in his pocket. He was behind enemy lines. But maybe he was safer here for awhile. And maybe it would help him find where Erica and Boyd had been for the last few months since Argent had supposedly let them all out of the basement. Stiles was the last one to have seen them, and he hadn’t been in a good place then to realize it.

Maybe something could be salvaged out of it.

“Okay,” he said, resigned. He could plan his way out of it if he had to. But he was tired.

“Good. All we ask is that you come down for meals. Nobody’s going to be your maid service, either. But there’s food. You can eat. We can stay out of each other’s way,” said Chris. Stiles nodded agreement; it sounded good to him.

“Just... do me a favor? One thing,” said Stiles. Chris stopped in the doorway as he was closing it, waited for the request with obvious patience.

“Next time somebody decides they have to shoot me, make sure it’s not loaded with werewolf drugs. Social services thinks I’m some kinda drug addict, and I’m living in hell.”

Argent didn’t have anything to say to that. He just closed the door.

*~*~*


	4. Chapter 4

**Pegasus Galaxy: Atlantis**

It looked like the mission was going to follow them around awhile. McKay’s shoulder was messed up, but would be soon on the mend under Carson Beckett’s care, and Weir was on Sheppard’s back about wanting to know what went wrong.

What went wrong in a nutshell: The gate address wasn’t friendly, the bad guys took them back through the gate and dumped them on a prison planet, where a bunch of whackjobs killed a member of his team, nearly killed another, and got a few days free hard labor out of the other two. It was a gigantic new level of FUBAR. And Sheppard and Dex told her that. In a slightly larger nutshell, but Sheppard had a headache, so he still took a few shortcuts.

The Director didn’t want to let him send a nuke through the gate, she was clear about that. John excused himself early to get out of the meeting, was told to go see Carson and get checked out with McKay.

But Carson was going to have his hands full with Rodney’s shoulder, Sheppard knew for a fact because he and Dex had seen it when they had nothing with them to help. The fact that Rodney was still sane, given his usual tolerance level for pain and really any inconvenience at all, was a flat out miracle. Sheppard didn’t want to interfere with the doctor’s work.

“Detour,” he announced as he and Ronon left Elizabeth’s office. Teyla met them at the stairs, nothing but apologies for having been on the mainland with the Athosians when the others had left to the Daturan gate.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Teyla, but I’m glad you weren’t with us on this one,” said Sheppard honestly. He couldn’t have handled it. Losing Hart was bad enough, but if the locals had gone after Teyla for some similarly bullshit offense, none of the team would have survived at all. “Besides, you probably wouldn’t let me nuke that planet, either.”

“No, Colonel. That wouldn’t be my first inclination,” said Teyla with a small smile, taking the comment in the spirit it was meant. Ronon shrugged it off.

“Doesn’t matter. We burned the place down anyway,” said Ronon. And Sheppard was going to convince himself they had lit every match.

“Now you are going to the infirmary?” Teyla asked as she walked with them.

“Nope, detour,” said Sheppard. He lifted an arm and pulled the cuff of his jacket back to show her the primitive but effective remains of the Daturan handcuffs he and Ronon still wore.

They looked like just straps of leather wrapped around each wrist, and their damn necks, too, with a single chain link pierced through in a couple of places that the taskmasters would use to loop chains or sticks through when they wanted the workers to stay in one area, or when they were locked up in the Daturan brig. When they weren’t being threatened with knives, the straps felt like regular leather, smooth and soft, and overall were easy to forget existed until Sheppard had started getting the annoying rash from it the third day of wearing them.

“I want these damn things off,” said Sheppard. He itched at the irritated skin under the cuff. “Now, preferably.”

“That shouldn’t be too hard,” said Teyla. Her people used leather for their daily needs and livelihood, and her blissful ignorance showed.

“You would think,” said Ronon. Sheppard paused in front of the armory and waved them both inside. Teyla blinked, surprised, but she didn’t say anything.

Sheppard and Ronon had already attacked the cuffs with knives back on the planet, and now, with Teyla’s assist, they carefully worked their way through the weapons in the armory. It didn’t take long for them to have exhausted everything short of the blow torch.

“I want out of this bastard neck tie. I want this thing off. Now.” John openly complained as he threw another knife back on the table. It didn’t matter what they used, with everything they tried, something in the straps could fuse the leather back together as fast as it was cut. The strap on his wrist tightened in response to his work at cutting it, and if he kept it up it was going to start cutting off circulation.

Ronon tried stabbing the one on his wrist, right through - because the man was a little unstable when it came to things that caused pain - and nothing happened. The strap repelled the blade entirely when cut at, from the outside or the inside of the cuff it didn’t matter. The weakest point on the cuffs were the metal rings, because the metal could be cut, scratched, burned off, but the leather couldn’t be harmed.

“It’s got to be some kind of organic, but what the hell,” said John. Ronon nodded his agreement with the theory, sliced at a folded edge of the strap with a small, ultra-sharp throwing star. They stood in a room surrounded by some of the galaxy’s most advanced weaponry, and they couldn’t find anything capable of cutting through leather.

It would be laughable if Sheppard weren’t already pissed off.

Ronon seemed to accept it as a puzzle, but he was losing his curiosity. He put the knife down and cast a glance at one of the smaller pistols. Sheppard followed his gaze, considered it, and then self consciously tucked his wrists behind his back.

“Bad idea,” he concluded. Teyla seemed to agree, reaching across the table to grab Ronon’s wrist and derail his experiment before he could begin.

“If it’s organic, maybe Dr. Beckett has a solution for it,” she suggested. “He would have to deal with Rodney’s in order to treat him, from what you have said.”

“Fair enough,” said Ronon. He looked to Sheppard. “We go to the doctor’s?”

John frowned, resisted the urge to pout, or even throw something.

“Yeah, fine,” he said instead. “You go. Check it out. I need to get some food. And I want a damn shower. So I’ll... go later.”

Mostly John was just tired of fighting it. He would try again if Carson found something that worked, and in the meantime he would try to wrap his mind around the permanent reminders so they wouldn’t continue to bother him.

So John Sheppard opted to disobey an order (only kinda...) to go find food instead. Real food, that wasn’t some questionable form of vegetable in dirt-laced broth, and god-only-knows what kind of alien roadkill rodent as a main course. He might look a mess, but he could at least enjoy the benefits of civilization again. Kinda. Atlantis wasn’t exactly five-star dining. But Sheppard would never complain about the food again after the last few weeks.

There were only a few people wandering around at that hour, somewhere in the middle of the night. Sheppard hadn’t bothered to look up a clock yet. But the mess hall was still open, and he got a few relieved “Welcome back, Colonel!” greetings along the way to finding a seat. He mustered up a mild smile for them and waved them on their way.

Sheppard found a table to himself, far too aware of the fact that he hadn’t showered in weeks to even think about imposing his presence on anyone who wasn’t in the same proverbial boat. Covered in soot and sweat and rock dust, as Rodney called it, John reeked of weeks of labor and hated it, but he at least was used to it. He still took his food out to the patio for the fresh ocean air.

He could almost relax as he pulled a fork through recognizable mashed potatoes and cut up a decent sized chunk of steak. For a bit of flavor, a bowl of chili sat on the corner of the tray, and if he managed to make it through all of that without making himself sick, there was a cinnamon roll calling his name for desert. After weeks on minimal rations, a proper feast wasn’t smart and John knew it. Which was why he would report for a medical check up after he ate his fill. The internal thrashing he was about to bestow upon himself was what the gurus back on Earth called “self-care” and he was sticking to it.

The alien organic nuisance at his throat threatened to tighten up on him as he ate, apparently not used to the extra work required for John to swallow real food. The little bastard was some kind of alive alright, if it recognized the difference between proper bite-size pieces and the heaping helpings John was treating himself to just then. John was all for table manners, but he didn’t appreciate the policing from an alien parasite. Just one more offense the prison planet would have to pay for. And served as an excellent reminder that he still owed them a nuke.

After the chili. Not before. Self-care.

John tugged stubbornly at the strap around his neck, distracted by the thought that it itched, and tucked into the chili. It wasn’t hot, but it felt like fire on his tongue. Spicy, hot, cold fire. How much seasoning did they bake into that thing under those hot lamps? There was some alien jalapeno in there somewhere, maybe it was a ghost pepper. It had never hit John that hard before, in over a year of mess hall food.

But then again, he had never spent over two weeks living on weed broth and outer space rodents before, either. Another spoonful disappeared into his mouth out of sheer stubborn pride. He would not be beaten by buffet-style chili, damnit.

The flavors in the spices overwhelmed him. Sheppard tried to back it off with a chaser of potatoes, but his spork scraped loudly on the tray, startling him, jarring his arm right up to his spine like nails on a chalkboard. He glanced at the utensil and suddenly everything in his vision blurred silver-gray and shiny. Very shiny.

It was a sudden new world of pain as every sense in his body lit up in the same kind of ghost-pepper fire as the traitorous chili that started the domino effect.

John wasn’t aware of anything around him, at all, for who knew how long. He felt locked up, like he had at the gate. All he could hear was the whirring of the metal of the city and the roar of the ocean behind him. Voices echoed over each other, hundreds of them, until all the sounds were the same, loud, flat wall around him. He was stuck in a loud, silver, painful chaos, and it was all the chili’s fault.

An overlap of voices broke out of the batch. A few people talking words that made sense.

“What do you mean, they won’t come off?”

“I mean, we tried everything. Colonel Sheppard wouldn’t let me shoot him, but, I mean, we tried everything else.”

“Well, get it off!”

“I haven’t tried it yet, honestly. I am a bit more worried about your shoulder, Rodney.”

“The neck bone’s connected to the shoulder bone, Carson!”

Sheppard finally managed to wrench his eyes closed, took a deep breath that burned, like he had forgotten how to make his lungs work in the static that had locked him up. He managed to drop the spork. The chili would win this round. And maybe Sheppard needed to check in with Carson Beckett himself.

*~*~*

The nap helped. John had passed out in his own room, on his own bed, and all he experienced for what felt like hours was sleep. It was great. For him, anyway.

Less great for everyone else when Elizabeth Weir found out the Lt. Colonel had bucked protocol and had yet to report into the med bay. But still. Great for Sheppard.

When the Director finally tracked him down on the city’s sensors, and he was ordered to the infirmary, John stalled long enough to attempt a shower. His head was still a little buzzy from the chili incident, so he kept his eyes closed and didn’t look at anything silver, just in case.

A simple shower, less than two minutes under falling water, somehow left him more on edge than relaxed. He found a clean coat to layer on as extra padding against the world and hid behind sunglasses to cut back the shine of the many reflective surfaces between his quarters and the med bay. The sun was coming up out over the water and John wasn’t looking forward to the experience of witnessing it for once.

After taking all those extra precautions, Sheppard still made the mistake of taking a shortcut through the gate room.

“Colonel Sheppard?” Weir spotted him remarkably quickly. And there was no reason for her to be yelling, but it was her city so Sheppard didn’t tell her to knock it off like he wanted to.

“Elizabeth,” Sheppard replied, his own voice quiet and slow in a hint. He forced a smile and tried not to wince at her volume as she walked ever so briskly down to him. It was never a good sign when Elizabeth Weir crossed her arms at him.

“Planning a trip off-world already?” she asked. He frowned, confused.

“No ma’am. On my way to see Dr. Beckett,” he reported. Weir nodded, but she was still sizing him up.

“He’s going to actually need to see you, you know,” she said. “Not just the coat and sunglasses.”

“Yes, I am aware, thank you,” said John, mirroring her sarcasm back at her. He lifted the glasses off his face, but he refused to strip even one layer in the gate room. “That better?”

“Maybe. What’s going on? Level with me,” Elizabeth said. She didn’t relax much, but the superficial, smug tone to her voice dropped away. Real concern, not just a gotcha trap. “Carson said you weren’t in all night. I’m at fault for slipping on the escort from the gate, but I didn’t expect you to skip protocol.”

“I was hungry,” John said, catching the whine in the complaint and trying to change course for his own pride. “I wanted real food, not a patient diet.”

“The others reported in.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“John, I understand the last few weeks -”

Whatever she was about to say was cut short by the gate alert. Chuck called down to the director, “Lorne return IDC confirmed.”

“I’ll just go check in with Carson then,” John said, looking to skip whatever misguided lecture Elizabeth was loading up. He smiled his most winning smile as a little boost in charm to help dodge that bullet at least another few hours. “Avoid the rush hour traffic.”

He didn’t follow Elizabeth up the stairs to clear the gate, just moved to the lower level instead.

“Colonel Sheppard!” Weir called after him.

John looked back at her at just the wrong moment. There was a bright flash as the wormhole activated, then the dancing light of the event horizon held his attention on the stargate. All of his attention. Sight, sound, everything owned by the gate because he looked at it.

Just like a few hours before, Sheppard locked up. Everything stopped. Breathing hurt because he wasn’t doing it. And nothing he tried seemed to work to get himself out of it.

*~*~*

The medbay was decidedly not a good place to get work done. Rodney was drugged into a nice, cozy, numb feeling through his shoulder and back, and he had already taken a nap. He wanted to be working on something very important to redirect the busy churning of his brain that reminded him he had lost over two weeks of time on a prison planet.

A _prison_ planet.

Rodney McKay on a nameless prison planet for so long was a waste of his natural talents, and he had a lot of missing time to make up for. It intruded on his sleep.

Rodney only had the gear from his pack at hand, otherwise he had to ask a nurse to go find something from somewhere, either a lab or the control room, or a dozen other places. Nurses weren’t scientists, of course, so they could never find anything that he asked for. He was aware that it wasn’t exactly in their job description, and it was kind of them to try anyway, but he would still acknowledge that they had failed both times he had asked. Twice was enough for that particular experiment, thank you.

Rather than do anything that was actually productive for the city, McKay went over the readings from the equipment that he and Aubrey Hart had carried on their disastrous away mission. It didn’t really matter what he found in the results because no one from Atlantis would ever again step foot on either of the planets they had collected the readings from. But there was a possibility he could find something useful on M5S-332 that they could use to justify making life hell for the Daturans who lived there.

Scientifically speaking, of course. Hypothetically.

Really, idle revenge theories were the best Rodney thought himself capable of at the moment, anyway. He was probably a little loopy in the head, if he was honest with himself. His shoulder had been badly burned from his arm and around to his shoulder blade on his back.

Burning trees hurt, a lot, as it turned out, and Rodney had a whole new respect for fire as a weapon. It turned out that, when one had brute strength on their side, burning things made a sizable dent in one’s opponent’s immediate life plans and provided an easy win in fights.

Personally, McKay thought Ronon Dex was a _better_ way to win fights and fully intended to keep the man between himself and any hostile forces from now on. It wasn’t really a change in policy for him, just a painful reminder that Rodney should stick to his personal policies better.

It would have helped Aubrey if it had been an option. But Ronon had already been taken away by then. McKay had been paranoid about the team splitting up any time since, after that morning.

He remembered seeing Aubrey lose her hat while the locals on the planet sorted the Daturan prisoners into work groups for the day. She had been shoved too hard and stumbled, caught herself, and bumped her hat off her head. Her lovely short blonde hair saw daylight for the first time on the planet and it froze every one of the locals.

Apparently only the upper class of Daturan society were blonds. The soldiers that minded the prison planet, the key-keepers that played taskmaster to the prisoners and locals alike, all of them had the same yellow blond hair. And that was all it took to brand the poor girl a threat, a spy, alongside her foreigner teammates.

Rodney and Sheppard were still locked to the rock wall with the others who hadn’t been sorted, and Ronon Dex had already been moved to the mines with the first group of the morning. She was on her own. The kangaroo court of dirty peasants and prisoners didn’t even take five minutes. She was killed twenty feet away from them, left there half the day to be sure she was dead before they took the body away.

Sheppard had been murderous for days after that. None of the locals or prisoners would go near him to let him off the wall, and the Daturan guards didn’t like having to intervene. It got all three of the remaining Atlantean team drugged and moved to another camp to start over because the Daturans didn’t want to waste the manpower.

It sucked.

Taking a deep breath, Rodney wiped at his face and tossed his tablet down on the bed. The medbay was depressing. Maybe Carson could do the treatment from Rodney’s lab instead.

There was a commotion in the next room suddenly. Just what Rodney needed. Something to focus on. He sat up a little, straining to see what was going on without disturbing the patches covering his shoulder and back. It was only when he saw Carson sweep in that McKay remembered he was supposed to be lying down on his side and not straining his back at all.

Oops.

The medics rolled in a gurney, with Elizabeth Weir running in behind it. Nobody looked happy.

Lt. Colonel Sheppard lay on the bed when the medics moved aside and McKay startled. The man’s eyes were open and his face was blank.

“What-”

“Not now, Rodney,” Carson ordered. He took note of the fact that McKay was sitting up though, growled at him about it, before turning back to deal with Sheppard. Rodney took the hint and eased carefully back to the raised pillows.

“He’s dehydrated, like the others,” came the report. A nurse tapped away at a screen while Carson checked over Sheppard. “Covered in bruises. Just once it would be nice if they didn’t come back from Fight Club. _Just_ once.”

“They were gone over two weeks, Carson,” offered Weir. Watching intently, Elizabeth lurked out of the way, obviously as anxious as Carson.

“Aye. Malnourished. Still _human_ ,” Carson rattled off different findings as he went. “Zero sensory response. Might as well be in a coma. What the hell-”

McKay stared from across the room, shocked. Sheppard had been healthy enough when they came through the gate five hours earlier. Maybe tired, sure. They all were. Now he lay in the medbay being strapped to life support by a nurse. Like he couldn’t breathe. Again. _Oh_.

Rodney remembered seeing Sheppard wheezing back on the planet a few times.

“I - I don’t know what this is. I’ll have to run some tests, see if it’s viral. Or some reaction to the -”

“Carson?”

“Bit busy,” came the tense reply. Rodney figured it was as much of an invitation as anything since the man had obviously heard him.

“He did this before though. On the planet,” Rodney said, insistent. Weir and Carson looked at each other, a different kind of concern on their faces as they looked back at Rodney. That made him nervous. “I’m fine though. I mean, aside from the shoulder.”

The doctor looked to Sheppard again after that. The room was still full of noise, as new machines lit up with heart rate, blood pressure, and brain activity monitors. Everything was too high, which didn’t track with the coma theory at all. The doctor’s team had peeled Sheppard out of his jacket and found no other injuries to explain anything. Bloodwork was going to take time.

“Sedate him,” said Weir. Rodney coughed into his pillow and started to sit up again, surprised by what he heard.

“Excuse me?” asked the actual medical doctor in charge of the room. Elizabeth pointed at the brain wave monitor.

“He’s awake. Put him to sleep,” she said. “Reset his system.”

“That man is the _farthest_ person here from a _computer_! No rebooting!” Rodney pointed out. Carson set a hand to Rodney’s uninjured shoulder and pushed him carefully back down. There were a hundred reasons why that was a bad idea, but it was clear that Carson was considering it.

And then, without any apparent explanation, the numbers on the screens all dropped. Even with the oxygen mask on, Sheppard took a gasping breath and came up coughing. He swatted at his face to get the mask off as Carson and a nurse rushed forward to help. Sheppard swatted at them too until he seemed to recognize them. Only then did he calm down. The man still sat straight-backed upright on the bed as he got his bearings.

“How- I was on my way-” Sheppard seemed genuinely disoriented and concerned. He didn’t seem to have control of his voice, either, with the volume going up and then down like he was still remembering how to breathe. It was truly bizarre to witness, after years of watching the man in the field, taking on fights or assuming control of alien technologies far beyond anything he should have had the mental awareness to operate. John Sheppard was a confident man, and Rodney had never seen him actually helpless before.

Rodney didn’t like it in the medbay at all.

“You stopped responding after the gate activated,” Elizabeth told Sheppard. “You were barely breathing and fell over when someone touched you. So we moved you to the infirmary. Where you should have been to begin with.”

“I was on my way there,” Sheppard said, countering her _passive-aggressive_ with his own open _annoyance_. “I needed food and hadn’t had a shower in weeks. It had to wait.”

“Well, it shouldn’t have. If you had been five feet closer to the gate when this happened, you’d be dead right now,” said Weir. She wasn’t messing around with the flyboy’s stubborn streak, a lieutenant colonel or not. “So now you’re here until Dr. Beckett releases you, with very _explicitly_ clear answers to what caused this.”

Sheppard frowned. “I think there was something in the chili. Someone should look into that...”

“The... chili?” asked Carson, confused. “This was no allergic reaction, Colonel.”

“I didn’t say it was. I don’t have allergies,” said Sheppard. McKay rolled his eyes at the stupid military jock superiorority complex over the nerds with the allergies, right there in the colonel’s voice to insult him to his face.

“It wasn’t the chili, is what I’m saying,” said Carson. Sheppard shrugged it off, just as clueless as the doctor on the cause. “So I’d like to ask when these episodes started, and how many have ye had?”

“Just now, that’s one. And the chili this morning, that’s two,” said Sheppard. Like that was it. No more to list off. McKay waited in the awkward silence as Beckett and Weir both turned to look at him expectantly. Sheppard noticed and narrowed his eyes at Rodney from across the room.

“What’d I miss?” he asked.

“Well... just that I noticed you having problems breathing on at least two seperate instances on the planet,” Rodney told him. “Once when the Daturans sent our camp into the caves without Ronon, and once at-”

“The battle at the gate,” Sheppard said. He seemed to have forgotten the instances until they were mentioned and allowed McKay’s intrusion into his medical consultation. Sheppard looked up at Carson again. “Okay, four times. But the first two weren’t like the last two.”

“Not like them how, exactly?” asked Carson.

“Well, not like... not as intense, or quite as... weird. I could still move in the first two. I snapped out of it and got back to work,” said Sheppard. Words weren’t his strong suit and McKay found the explanation lacking, but it seemed to make sense to Beckett and Weir.

“So what you’re saying is they’re getting worse? These episodes of whatever they are,” said Carson. Weir wandered back over to McKay and picked up the tablet off the end of the bed, set right to work doing something on it without permission. When McKay started to complain, she silenced him with a look and he settled down reluctantly.

Sheppard carried on defending himself to the doctor. “I’m not saying it’s getting worse, I’m just saying-”

“Aye, you’re saying they’re increasing in severity and happening more often,” Carson interrupted the argument. “And that it wasn’t the chili, and that the cafe chefs did _not_ attempt to poison the station’s ranking military officer.”

“Okay, fine, it wasn’t the chili,” said Sheppard. “But I’m fine in between. I feel fine now. I’m breathing now. I can see everything fine. I can hear you yelling at me about it just fine. I’m saying I don’t have to be removed from duty over it.”

“You weren’t breathing, Colonel. That’s not nothing,” said Carson. He frowned and then seemed to catch a new track. “What’s this about your vision now?”

Sheppard sighed. He wasn’t getting out of it. McKay knew the feeling.

“I don’t know. Everything gets very bright. I mean, very bright. And real colorful. I could see some crazy detail, back planet-side. Distance or up close, it didn’t seem to matter. I noticed that a few days ago.”

“And sounds, ye mentioned,” coached the doctor.

“Everybody’s yelling all the time now,” John complained. He waved a hand around the room. “And this city echoes. Like, a lot.”

McKay was used to being told to quiet down, but he knew that no one had been yelling in the room. He kept quiet as Elizabeth handed Carson the stolen tablet. John started tugging at the leather cuff from the prison planet, like it bothered him. Maybe it was an allergy after all, McKay wondered idly, like to the organic material that had yet to let go of any of the trio of former prisoners. McKay sat up again and reached for the scanner tablet in Hart’s duffle off the other side of his bed.

Carson read in silence off the tablet Weir had given him, silent and concerned.

“So then the chili. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it was hotter than usual? Too spicy?” Carson finally asked. He gave the tablet back to Weir and she returned it to Rodney just as he had left it. Sheppard sat, sulking now, across the room and shrugged.

“Well, yeah. I had my own one-man show of Goldilocks and the three bears on my dinner plate, and the only thing that was _Just Right_ was the mashed potatoes,” said Sheppard.

“And you froze up, like in the gate room?” Carson asked. Sheppard didn’t answer at first. McKay looked up to see him scowling at his boots, angry about whatever Carson was getting at. It seemed innocent enough to McKay.

“I’m going to guess that ye did,” said Carson, gently about it.

“Yeah. The chili kicked my ass,” Sheppard reported.

There was a long silence from the other side of the room. It was distracting. Way too heavy. McKay found he couldn’t focus on the new Very Important Thing he was looking into because they were all being so quiet. But he couldn’t exactly complain about it, either.

“I’ll need to look into a few more things,” said Dr. Beckett finally. Doctor voice. Serious voice. Uhoh. “And do a full panel. Bloodwork will at least rule out anything from the planet. So you should stay here until we’re sure.”

“Sure of what, doc?” asked Sheppard. It sounded a lot like Carson was sitting on an unpleasant theory, and the man was worse at lying than Rodney was.

“I want to rule out the ProX gene. It could explain a few of your symptoms. And from what Rodney and Ronon have already told me, the conditions may have been sufficient to trigger the episodes,” said Carson.

“What the hell is the ProX gene?” asked Sheppard. Carson frowned, apparently stuck on the question.

“It was discovered some years ago now, but generally speaking it’s not something I’ve had to interact with. It’s not my area,” he said. Weir stood by, her arms crossed. The pair of them together looked like they were expecting a funeral.

“Have you heard of the Sentinel Project back home, Colonel?” she asked. Sheppard nodded.

“Sure. But like Carson said, it’s not exactly my area. I just know to avoid their agents,” he said.

“The Sentinel Project found the gene. It’s how they identify their candidates. Carriers are supposed to be reported to command once the gene is identified. The ProX gene activates the human sensory inputs, amplifies them to harmful levels. It’s a few fold more intense than someone having really good hearing or eyesight,” said Elizabeth. She seemed to uncurl a little and shook out some of the tension in her arms, like she was nervous. “Homeworld Security took over the program a few years ago when they found a link between the ProX and the ATA gene. It’s all pretty new, but it was enough to link the programs.”

“And the thing of it is, you’ve got an extraordinarily high percentage of the ATA in your code as it is,” added Carson. It wasn’t the politics of some program that made him paranoid about the subject. “So the ProX would make sense, if it’s there at all. And we’ll check. But I don’t know what the activated ProX will do in your system. Hence, you stay here until we know more.”

The heavy silence came back then. Rodney forgot what he was researching as he looked from face to face, vaguely aware he wasn’t supposed to be in the room for the conversation that had just happened. But the questions burned at his tongue. Rodney caught himself leaning to see better and managed not to fall on his face, and John looked over at him, just acknowledging his roommate’s presence. His attention then went back to Carson.

“So which is it? Do you think we’re ruling out this ProX activation? Or waiting to rule out something from the planet?” he asked.

Carson looked pained. Finally, he offered, “From what little I’ve got to go on, just now? We’re ruling out the viral interference. This looks much more like the ProX. And when you’re a little bit away from this most recent episode, there are some scales we can run you through. But... My resources are limited here. You’ll have to go back to Earth for the full work up.”

“Absofuckinlutely not,” replied Sheppard easily. “I’m not leaving Atlantis over this. Some damn prison planet will not be my last run.”

“John.” Elizabeth quieted from the look Sheppard aimed her way.

“No. Not up for discussion. Now, I will sit here for whatever tests you want me to. I will camp out until I can go back to active duty. Dr. Beckett will be sick of seeing my smiling face as we figure out what this is. _Exactly_ what this is. And if it’s the gene, we’ll figure out how to turn the damn thing off. We’ve got plenty of experience with that now, haven’t we? But I will not be going back to Earth with this.”

It wasn’t the kind of tone a rational person would argue with, because every word said the man wouldn’t listen. He was set to argue and ignore, whatever the cost. And the cost would likely be another _episode_ , which Carson Beckett was duty-bound to avoid. So the doctor gave an awkward cough, shuffled, and looked to Weir.

“I think that’s a plan to aim for. So, Director, if you’ll excuse us, Colonel Sheppard and I still have work to do before he sleeps.”

“I already had a nap,” said John.

“And it won’t take long for me to get sick of your smiling face at this rate, yet there’s still much to be done between now and then,” said Carson with forced sweetness to match John’s stubbornness. It was also terribly clear that Carson hadn’t had a nap himself in at least a good while.

“Oh, right,” Sheppard replied. He nodded acceptance and sat back against the pillows like a good patient. “I could use the quiet. Did anybody find my sunglasses?”

Weir dropped the winter jacket and sunglasses on his lap after retrieving them from a chair nearby. She was not happy about the doctor’s policy for placating a moody patient, but she wasn’t going to overstep.

Rodney watched it all play out, jaw slack. When the others left, he looked to Sheppard.

“So what exactly-”

“Rodney.”

“...Yes?”

“I want quiet. No talking.”

McKay frowned at the dismissal as John disappeared behind his sunglasses, in a room that already wasn’t very bright, and climbed into a heavy coat. The room wasn’t cold, either, but Rodney was half wrapped in bandages with weird magic-science-ointments because of a burn, so his internal temperature might not have tracked the room correctly.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“Quiet, Rodney.”

*~*~*


	5. Chapter 5

Sheppard had been in the medbay for two days. He was well past tired of Doctor Beckett and it was probably mutual. Both of them were tired of Mckay, though, so their friendship remained through their mutual hardship.

Mostly John was just cranky. And he knew it, which made him all the more cranky because he couldn’t actually blame Carson and Rodney. Not really.

The doc’s tests hadn’t given him any good news. There hadn’t been any more lock ups while he was stuck in the medbay, but all signs still pointed to ProX.

Sheppard had to sleep with noise canceling headphones because the presence of another human in the room was too loud for him to rest otherwise. He heard everything. Heart beats, breathing, snoring, weird gurgles, and other human noises he didn’t want to think about mixed in with the _whirr_ of machines and creaking of the metal walls entire stories above the rocking ocean waves. It was bad enough to feel the movement under his feet, just as clearly as if they had been on a fleet carrier back on Earth, but the _sound_ could be nerve wracking. Everything was just so loud on Atlantis compared to how it had been planetside.

He spent enough time back in the city to realize that most of the conversations he heard were happening in another room, maybe another floor, but he couldn’t narrow it down. He could sort out the echoing sound of the ocean that rolled through the halls and the individual voices of Carson’s team. He knew the environmental controls had gone sideways on them and had to ask Carson to send Zalenka after it because there was no way the medbay chief was going to let John chase up to the control center to ask him about it himself. Carson wouldn’t even let John have a radio, he said to minimize the amount of sound he could lock up on, but it was probably to keep him from abandoning the enforced medical leave he had been placed on.

Beckett wasn’t playing with something he only knew about in vague theories, and Sheppard didn’t really want to argue since arguing, so far, had left him gasping for air. He _liked_ breathing.

Rodney switched on and off at random when he wasn’t sleeping; he was either complaining about pain, muttering to himself about equations or code, or he was more loudly sharing about some genius named Rodney McKay who Sheppard had come to conclude lived in another plane of existence entirely because the other guy sounded a lot nicer than John knew Rodney to be.

The worst part of all of it was the sitting still. John got in a lot of naps between outbursts from his roommate, and actual sleep when Rodney slept, which was nice. He discovered that he really did need the sleep. But there was no wandering the station allowed, no going for runs, no trips to the cafeteria. There was a private bathroom down the hall, and that was as far as the off-duty Lt. Colonel was permitted to go unsupervised.

To make up for it, John tried sit ups, push ups, and some tai chi in his pursuit of playing the good patient. He even played chess with Rodney when he wasn’t otherwise inclined to add to the man’s injury list. He wasn’t letting some stupid gene ground him for life when he had another stupid gene that promised to show him other galaxies. That wasn’t going to work with John Sheppard at all.

The only hiccup to his perfect-patient, anti-ProX plan was the cuff at his wrists and neck. The damn things weren’t backing off and the rash was getting worse instead of better. Revenge for the times he had taken knives to them, probably. Every time Carson saw it, he told John to leave the things alone because he was obviously irritating them. Ronon and Rodney didn’t have rashes, and Rodney was the one with allergies, so it had to be something Sheppard was doing to it.

“But I’m not doing anything to them,” John insisted.

“Well, I suggest doing less of what you aren’t doing to it then,” said Carson. John was pretty sure at this point, the doctor needed to get more sleep. But he kept his mouth shut as Carson changed out the bandage under the cuffs in an effort to make it harder for the organic straps to touch skin. It didn’t work, but it was better than nothing.

“How about we just poison the bastards so they die without taking me with them,” John said.

“Trust me, John. I’ve been workin’ on it with Ronon. When we find something that works, we’ll let ye know,” promised the doctor. At least they were still on a first-name basis, so John figured maybe he still had a chance at escaping the ProX noose.

On day five, Rodney was sent home. The burn was healed just enough that he wouldn’t accidentally tear skin reaching for a data crystal, so he could return to whatever tasks he felt capable of without the help of the stronger pain medication. He still had regular visits for medicines, and strict orders to keep his arm in a sling to keep from overusing repairing muscles, but there was no reason for Carson to keep tormenting Rodney, himself, and Sheppard all three with the physicist's presence. He was not going to be the most pleasant to be around for a few days more, and John was glad to have his own space again in the back room of the medbay.

The weird part was that, after Rodney left, the room somehow got louder instead of quieter. John reverted to wearing the noise-cancelling headphones more often, even when doing his tai chi routine so he could focus on his own breathing without the interference of conversations from other rooms. He chalked it up to cabin fever and buried his head under his jacket, adding an extra sound dampener. But the ringing silence made his skin crawl. He could hear everything he didn’t want to, but it all sounded empty.

In the dark, under the jacket, behind the technological ear muffs, John found himself sorting through noises the same way he would sort through the voices in the medbay when he wanted to snoop in on if Carson had learned anything he hadn’t shared yet. The problem was that John didn’t know what he was sorting the sounds for, what he wanted to focus on in all the sounds he could hear. He just kept listening. And before he realized it, he was locked up.

John had no way to know how long he was under. He “woke up” the same as before, with Beckett and a nurse standing by the bed and monitors stuck to his head, chest, and fingers. This time the nurse was taking his blood and goddamn if it didn’t hurt like she was using a lead pipe in place of a needle. But John’s chest hurt. A lot. So he didn’t fight the oxygen mask or the blood draw and he lay still so it would kick in faster. Less pain was good. He was feeling those forty-three years a lot lately and he didn’t like it.

When he stabilized, he carefully reached for the mask and Carson helped move it away.

“So... what was that?” Carson asked, careful and concerned. “You’ve been three days without an episode. And this one, ye had the only failsafes we’ve got already in use.”

John shook his head, honestly without answers. Honestly, maybe, a little scared. “I don’t know. It was too quiet. I know... I mean, this sounds weird, but... I was sorting sounds, and then I... just got stuck.”

Carson sighed heavily and sat down in the chair beside the bed.

“This is the gene, I’m sure of it,” he said. He sounded distressed. “I’m sorry, John. But it’s the only thing we’ve found.”

John nodded, only grudgingly resigned to it.

“But it only just turned on, right? There’s got to be a way to turn it off. Just fit in a new bit of code, undo the Daturan mindfuck-”

“That’s not exactly how it works. Once it brought you online, it sets off a chain reaction. One tiny bit of code flips the switch on a dozen other bits of genetic code along the chain. And from what I can find? In all the research the last ten years, apparently no one’s ever looked into exactly which switches have to be flipped to turn the system off again. Going to the program, back on Earth - that’s the quickest way to get you back on your feet, John. I’m sorry, but it is.”

“And if I go back _there_ , they won’t let me back _here_ , so that’s not gonna happen,” Sheppard explained, a hard edge to his patience. Carson looked at him, frowning and unhappy in his sympathy for the spot John was in.

“Messing with this gene... it could mean messing with the ATA. You’ve got too much that could go wrong. Even if ye stay here, it... could still go very, very badly,” he said. Sheppard shrugged it off.

“So I need a third option. I can’t stay here like this, and I can’t go back to some training program wrapped up in red tape. Door number three, Carson. Gotta keep looking.”

The pep talk didn’t seem to work. Carson sagged a little in his chair.

*~*~*

“I got it! Ah ha!”

Rodney didn’t bother to curb the enthusiasm in his boast as he marched into the infirmary. Sheppard let out a yelp and covered his ears as everyone else just looked up at the scientist’s entrance. Carson noticed his patient’s reaction and belatedly shushed McKay.

“Ye got what, now?” he asked, just above a whisper. Rodney didn’t catch the hint. He held his right hand up to show Carson the organic strap still leashed there.

“These. I know how we get rid of them. And it’s so damn simple-” Rodney stopped talking as Sheppard appeared at his shoulder. “Should you be out here?”

“It’s too quiet in my room. I can be around people, Rodney,” said Sheppard. Apparently after six days in the infirmary, John Sheppard got to live there. Huh. McKay looked to Carson for confirmation.

“You’re sure he’s not contagious? Nothing viral?”

“Certain, at this point,” said Carson. Sheppard rolled an impatient hand in the air.

“Focus, people. How do we get the cuffs off?” he asked.

“Oh, right. So we need access to the Daedalus,” said McKay. That was met with confusion and some alarm.

“Is the Daedalus still here?” Sheppard asked, eyes wide. Rodney and Carson both nodded their heads.

“Uh. Doctor Weir asked Colonel Caldwell to wait, while ye were missing. And then, you with the ProX...” Carson trailed off to avoid the unwanted topic. John grimaced but also willingly left it alone. Before Rodney could carry on with his genius plan, the headset radio squawked in his ear.

“Dr. Beckett, please accompany Lt. Colonel Sheppard to the conference room,” announced Weir’s voice. Rodney frowned.

“Can that wait?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Sheppard. Rodney tilted his head, confused, since John didn’t have a radio on. Carson frowned disapprovingly at the both of them.

“No,” he said. He caught Sheppard by the arm to drag him toward the door and get him moving. “On our way, Director,” he said into his radio.

Sheppard went along with it, but he grabbed Rodney by the cuff around the neck, just a tug on the metal ring there to get him walking along with them.

“Talk, Rodney. Quickly,” he ordered.

“Alright! Jeeze...” McKay followed along, but he stayed out of grabbing range. “The transporters on the Daedalus. We raise the sensitivity on the-”

Rodney broke off on a yelp as he nearly ran into the doctor. Carson stopped so suddenly, pulled Sheppard to a stop to face him, making sure his patient looked him in the face. He even shook a finger at him to accentuate the severity of whatever had so quickly offended him.

“You. Cannot. Use. The transporters,” he said. He was very clear on that point, despite the ridiculous accent muddling up his words. Sheppard scoffed at it.

“I’ve used them dozens of times,” said John.

“Aye, but that was before. As far as I know, there’s never been a Sentinel through the transporters, and I’ll be damned if ye’ll be the first.”

“Not a Sentinel,” replied Sheppard. Carson leveled a glare at him for it. Rodney sighed loudly, annoyed that his genius was being undercut by Sheppard’s whatever-it-was.

“It’s perfectly safe, Carson.”

“Not for this one,” said the doctor, pointing at Sheppard’s face. He looked to McKay then. “If the Director and the Colonel okay it, ye can try it with Ronan. But Colonel Sheppard is limited to places he can physically walk to for the foreseeable future. And you, Rodney- too sensitive on those transporter scrubbers and you may ruin your shoulder before it’s healed. So it may be clever if it works, but only one of the three of ye are healthy enough to try it.”

Rodney blinked at the doctor, surprised. Carson took advantage of the pause and started them walking again. “Director’s expecting us.”

While the Director wasn’t exactly expecting him, McKay invited himself along in order to ask her about the transporter tests. He wasn’t expecting the sour faces he saw waiting at the conference room table when they got into the room, however, and it made him pause to consider.

“Dr. McKay? Can this wait?” Elizabeth asked him.

“I’ve - I found something...”

“No, it can’t,” said John as McKay looked uncertainly to Carson. The Lt. Colonel nodded at him, too, the one that usually meant Rodney was right, so he stayed where he was. Carson sighed and moved to dismiss the director’s concerns.

“It’s related, Director. He should probably be here,” said Carson. And again Sheppard nodded, so Weir dropped it. She pointed John to a center seat.

“Prefer to stand, Director,” said John from behind his sunglasses.

“Sit, Lt. Colonel,” said Colonel Steven Caldwell. The not so subtle pulling rank made Rodney reconsider his choice to stay in the room. The staring match that followed didn’t help. This was a military thing. He didn’t need to be there for that part of it. He was just a contractor, which allowed him the freedom to escape tense conversations that weren’t associated with the safety of the ship. This was not one of those.

Rodney backed up a step, only to hit the closed door. He was apparently in the room until he was released now, too. Great.

Carson nudged his elbow and scooted to grab a seat. Rodney followed his example out of scientific solidarity. The Lt. Colonel still stood behind them.

“I’m good, sir,” said Sheppard.

“It wasn’t a request. And lose the glasses. We’re indoors,” replied Caldwell.

Only under orders did John Sheppard sit at the conference table with the rest of them. Rodney was fairly certain they were all still friends, so the resistance was confusing. He watched John comply with the sunglasses orders, saw the man squint up at the lights briefly before seeming to adjust and looking back to the Colonel.

“Look, we all know what this is about,” John said. Rodney almost pointed out that he was still in the dark, but the look on Caldwell’s face at John’s announcement actually made it through McKay’s social blindness and he realized honesty was not appropriate in this situation. John continued on, regardless.

“And I’m working on it with the on-board physician. It is an ongoing situation, and we’re in the process of sorting it out. It’s just going to be a process. It won’t be a problem forever. We’ve got it well in hand.”

“That’s all well and good, but this city can’t be put on hold while you come to terms with your situation, Colonel Sheppard,” said Caldwell. “And we can’t ignore the fact that there are already policies in place for the situation you’ve found yourself in. They may be located back on Earth, but you are still beholden to them, another galaxy notwithstanding.”

“And if we can turn the gene off, I’m not out of compliance with Command’s policies,” said Sheppard. He was being very cautious. McKay stared at his friend, wondering for the first time very seriously what had happened to John on that planet that the military had _policies_ about it.

“You are at least three days out of compliance. Dr. Beckett has responsibilities to this entire city that he can’t put aside because you don’t want to play by the rules. Rules you agreed to a long time ago, and under any other circumstances would have to enforce yourself, if you’re still capable of doing your job,” said Colonel Caldwell.

“That’s hardly fair, Colonel,” said Director Weir. “No one knows what’s in their genetic code when they sign up for military service. This is a special instance-”

Caldwell turned his attention to the Director on his side of the table. “And yet there are programs in place for special cases just like this one, Director. It’s almost like the ratio of Sentinel among the US military is _only_ one in every six hundred troops and Command has seen this special case before.”

Elizabeth took the point and stared uncomfortably at the table as Caldwell turned back to Sheppard. “Assignment to Atlantis is no different than assignment to Afghanistan. You’re still subject to military command, which means we have to involve the Sentinel Project for consult. And any negotiations for turning the gene off should be handled through them, utilizing their medical units. Not Dr. Beckett’s.”

“But Carson’s literally among the best geneticists in two galaxies,” McKay interrupted, surprising even himself as he came to a better understanding of exactly what was being discussed. “If there’s a chance in hell at turning a gene off, especially one derivitave from the ATA, Carson needs to be involved. Especially considering Colonel Sheppard’s ATA status. That alone makes him too valuable to Atlantis, to exploration of Pegasus at all if we’re honest. Sheppard has to be here, and any scientist messing with the ATA genetics should have that at front of mind when they work with this.”

Whatever “this” actually was. Rodney was going to have to do some research. Assuming Caldwell didn’t kill him for speaking up. Rodney looked over at Carson, seeing the doctor had gone a shade whiter even as he nodded agreement.

“Manipulating the gene is too sensitive to be handled on the mainland. Not when John - Colonel Sheppard uses it out here,” Carson said.

That sounded like a win and Rodney relaxed, the knot of anxiety in his stomach loosening a little. He shuffled his arm uncomfortably in the sling and sat up a little. He was suddenly stressed. And hungry. Hopefully the meeting was over soon so he could ask Colonel Caldwell for permission to toy with the Daedalus transporter system before he tracked down lunch.

Oh. Damn.

Rodney realized he probably should have kept his mouth shut in the first place if he wanted to ask a favor from the colonel.

Caldwell took in a deep sigh, leaned forward to rest his arms on the table as he looked at each of them. “I understand the point you’re trying to make here. Contrary to Dr. Weir’s private complaints, this isn’t a military coup of Atlantis security. There is no question as to the Lt. Colonel’s value to the Atlantis mission. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” said McKay as the other two nodded. He was still slightly defensive, however, because Caldwell was not generally a Nice Guy about Atlantis and military operations lately, and Rodney wasn’t sure he would be able to argue about it with the man and still be granted permission to use the Daedalus computers. There was a marked conflict of interests potentially preventing him from getting his way on too many unknowns in this conversation.

“Good,” said Caldwell, not exactly unhappily. “Now, then you can understand me on this, too. That gene is online. Online is _online_. The position of the ranking officers above the Lt. Colonel and myself is that the known and established threat of the ProX gene is a matter for the Sentinel Program. The Sentinel training is a requirement for any member, of any branch of the US military or Command, once the gene activates. Period. Full stop. That makes it an order. One of those things that cannot be ignored because it creates an inconvenience for the officer or his crew. Is that also clear?”

There was a guilty quiet in the room after that. McKay shrank a little in his seat. Even Weir studied the table top under the stylus she toyed with. The point was apparently clear to the people at the table.

Sheppard wasn’t happy, but he sat up in his chair a little straighter. “Understood, Colonel.”

“Thank you,” said Caldwell. He seemed genuine enough about it. “Now, I can’t tell Dr. Beckett what to do with his time. But I can tell you what to do with yours, Lt. Colonel. Stop wasting the man’s time on the gene. The Sentinel Project isn’t a damn death sentence. Just save your questions for them. And the Daedalus and her crew will be escorting you to the program when we leave tomorrow.”

“And the Daedalus will escort you back from Earth upon completion of the program as well,” added Elizabeth. McKay felt his jaw go slack, a little shocked at the realization that Atlantis would be without Sheppard for months.

“Whenever that is,” said Sheppard. “Because from what I’ve seen, once you’re in that section, you stay there. They determine where you can be assigned for service.”

Caldwell nodded but shrugged it off. “I’m sure there are -”

“Exceptions to policy?” Sheppard interrupted the Colonel without hesitation. Caldwell stared back at him for the challenge.

“Yep,” said the Colonel. “Exceptions determined by the appropriate officials at the appropriate point along the _chain of command_.”

“The position will wait for your return,” Elizabeth promised. She didn’t exactly end the standoff, but she at least made Rodney feel a little better.

“Then I guess I’d better go pack,” said Sheppard. Next to the Lt. Colonel, Carson let out a breath and seemed to relax a little.

“Excellent idea,” replied Caldwell. “Thank you, Lt. Colonel.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Sheppard said, but McKay was certain he didn’t mean it. Unless it was for not throwing Sheppard in the brig for being three days out of compliance with an order from the top. Maybe that. But rather than dismiss himself to go pack, Sheppard still sat at the table.

“So since we’re all here, Rodney has a science favor to ask, on behalf of myself, himself, and Ronon.”

Rodney wasn’t expecting the hard left turn the conversation had just taken back in his direction. “Well, Ronon doesn’t actually know about-”

“Not the point, Rodney.”

“Right.”

Elizabeth sat back in her chair, crossed her arms as she waited them out. “What’s that, Dr. McKay?”

“Well, see, these things-” McKay held up his own wrist, then grabbed Sheppard’s for added emphasis - mostly as revenge for grabbing his neck earlier - and tugged at the leather cuff. “These things are organic. And obviously unhealthy. And we can’t kill them, cut them, or scratch them. Doing so actually results in the opposite of anything useful.”

“He means the damn things strangle us,” offered Sheppard, protectively pulling his arm back and adjusting the bandages back over the rash they caused. “We need them gone.”

“Right. And the transporters can be tuned into-”

“You want to use the transporters to remove them?” asked Caldwell. Rodney bit his tongue on the annoyance at everyone interrupting his efforts at explaining his genius plans for them.

“Yes, sir. It doesn’t seem to be an extraordinarily complex entity. If we still had access to a Dart, that would separate the codes. The Daedalus sensors should be capable of it as well. With a much lower percentage risk of terminal failure than if I tried to put something together from scratch. I mean, I could, but the idea is to get them off _sooner_ rather than later.”

“And that wouldn’t jive too well with the whole leaving tomorrow thing,” added Sheppard. Rodney looked over at him, annoyed.

“I remind you, I have been known to do more with less in far less time,” he replied. Sheppard waved his wrist in return.

“Focus, McKay.”

To Sheppard’s right, Dr. Beckett raised his hand. One, Rodney noted jealously, that did not have an organic leather monster on the wrist. But seeing as how he was the medical doctor and surgeon in the room, on second thought, Rodney was okay with the inequity.

“I have an opinion on this proposal,” said Carson. “A medical one.”

Nope, Rodney was annoyed at the injustice of the world again. Or galaxy. Whatever.

“A trip through the stargate, or through the transporters, either one, is a bad idea just now. Colonel Sheppard’s system may not react well to either of them,” said Carson.

“I’ve already been through the gate once since this thing activated. I’m fine,” said Sheppard quickly.

“You weren’t when you got here,” said Weir. “As I recall, you promptly abandoned protocol for a _nap_.”

“And some chili,” added Rodney. He felt more than noticed Sheppard glaring at him and looked up. “What? You said it kicked your ass. I think? It’s a little fuzzy. I think I was on drugs at the time.”

“Yes, Rodney. You very much _were_ ,” said Sheppard, jaw tense. “Now can we skip to the part where people get off my back and figure out how to get me out of these damn handcuffs? It’s been almost a week home now, and a few weeks before that, and I think I’ve put in my time.”

Rodney had been on plenty of missions with Sheppard where everything had gone wrong, and he had very rarely snapped quite like that. There was something more like hurt than anger to the quiet statement. Rodney heard the life-or-death demand for help that he was actually very, very familiar with from missions. And handcuffs had never triggered that before.

“It’s not about the handcuffs,” McKay realized quietly, surprisingly quiet considering who Rodney was as a person, generally. John looked over at him again and he did almost seem... scared.

“No, Dr. McKay. It’s not,” Sheppard said, much softer than before. Sheppard scrubbed at his face, messed up perpetually messy hair as he tossed the sunglasses on the table in front of himself. It was distress. Rodney could recognize it when he knew to look.

“I just... need help. I need _something_ that works,” said Sheppard. Rodney looked from his friend to Colonel Caldwell.

“Gimmie... two hours on the Daedalus. I can create the capture system,” he said, looking to put tangible help in front of Sheppard. Caldwell nodded.

“You’ve got it,” the Colonel said.

“Colonel Sheppard, you should go pack. So you can get on board and try it out when it’s ready,” said Elizabeth. She looked from John to Carson, running interference from the doctor’s concern over McKay’s project proposal. “Dr. Beckett, I need a word before you go back to the infirmary.”

Taking that as a dismissal, Rodney scrambled out of his chair. He wanted to reassure Sheppard that the thing he could do to help would be done, successful, and under time. John still looked shaken up. The only reassurance Rodney thought might help just then was a hand on the shoulder as he passed by to open the doors. That was the stuff McKay would reluctantly admit he was bad at. But he could still try.

*~*~*

“Is this important? I only came back early to get Ronon- Oh. There you are.” McKay stopped talking as he saw the subject of his search camped out in the corner of the Director’s office. Well, that was easy, if slightly annoying. “I’ve been trying to get you on the Daedalus for the past fifteen minutes.”

Ronon Dex just shrugged. “Elizabeth called a meeting.”

“So you couldn’t answer a -”

“Rodney.” Elizabeth caught his attention and Rodney switched gears.

“Yes?”

“Can you sit a moment?” The director motioned toward the chair opposite hers, beside Teyla. McKay pointed back over his shoulder at the door.

“I promised Sheppard-”

“This is about Colonel Sheppard,” Elizabeth said. McKay slid into the directed chair to wait.

“Okay, but I’ve got an hour left,” he said, tapping his wrist where there should have been a watch face instead of a piece of annoying alien technology.

“You’ll make it,” offered Teyla. She believed what she said, so Rodney had no trouble believing her, too. The three of them looked to Dr. Weir then.

“The situation we find ourselves in with Jo-Colonel Sheppard is not a good one,” Elizabeth said, wringing her hands in front of herself as she leaned on the desktop. “But I’m hoping at least the timing will work in our favor. We seem to still be off the Wraith’s radar, which for the moment means Atlantis is more or less safe. If we’re going to be losing our security-”

“We’re not losing him. He’s coming back,” said Rodney, annoyed at the implication.

“Coming back?” echoed Teyla. She was confused. She didn’t know.

Oh. Right.

Weir gave a pointed look at Rodney - the one that usually meant _shut up_ \- before looking to the other two. Ronon detached himself from the wall to move over to the desk behind Teyla.

“Where’s he going? What’s wrong with Sheppard?” he asked.

“That’s a long story,” said Elizabeth. She nodded toward Rodney. “And he doesn’t have the time, because he promised to have Colonel Sheppard out of the cuffs inside of-”

“Another hour,” Rodney said helpfully because he was still mentally watching the clock.

“So let me get to the point,” the Director continued. “Colonel Sheppard has been ordered back to Earth. It absolutely can’t be avoided. We’ve looked into every possibility to keep him here. I’m frankly still trying to. But in the meantime, he has to go back. And I’m hoping he won’t be there more than a month.”

“Even so, that’s three months without him here,” said Rodney. He _might_ have been whining.

“Why?” pressed Teyla.

“The last mission didn’t agree with him,” said Rodney, trying to fast-forward to the point. “Well, with any of us, but him especially.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” Elizabeth said.

“We’ve got an hour,” replied Ronon. He wasn’t going to budge any sooner than that and Rodney looked at Elizabeth in offended annoyance. Maybe Ronon had nothing better to do but-

“Actually, I’d like to give you more time than even that,” Elizabeth said, pouncing on the flustered delay from Rodney’s response. “Things are quiet here. They won’t be for John back on Earth. He’ll be there for training, and you are his team. You all work with him most often. You’ll have to be trained in how to work with him in the field. And Dr. Beckett will need to know how to care for him once he gets back to Atlantis. So I’d like you all to go back to Earth with Colonel Sheppard.”

Rodney stared at her, mouth hanging open in an undignified gape before he recovered, really processed what she was asking.

“Wait - are they going to let him come back?” he asked, remembering the mood in the conference room just an hour earlier. Something wasn’t adding up. Weir nodded. But she didn’t look confident.

“They should. But it will depend on the Sentinel Project directors. Unless I can stack the deck a little. And if I send a full team in for training alongside him, it might do it,” she said.

“And a few months away from Atlantis will be difficult for Colonel Sheppard, but we’re his team, as you said. We’ve worked dozens of off-world missions together. Maybe having friends there for this one will make it easier for him,” said Teyla. Weir shook her head.

“Teyla, I don’t know much about the Sentinel Project, but what I do know of it? It won’t be any kind of easy for someone like Colonel Sheppard. I think he’ll need his team at his back to help him get his head around the conditions he’ll be working under while he’s there. Because if he can’t, they won’t let him come back home.”

“I’m in,” said Ronon. Teyla nodded her second and Ronon tapped her chair. “And she’s in. And McKay’s in.”

“Excuse me?” asked the McKay in question. “I can’t just leave for three months or more at the drop of a hat! And there’s actual things I do here, believe it or not-”

Ronon smiled at him, moved to stand behind Rodney’s chair instead of Teyla’s. Big, oafish, barbarian hands clapped down on Rodney’s shoulders, only slightly accommodating the extra padding for the burn on one of them. His hands cinched right up next to Rodney’s neck and the leather cuff there. Rodney stayed very still because he was quite aware that Ronon knew exactly what the loops on the leather cuffs were used for, just like Sheppard did. The quiet lasted another beat.

“See? He’s in,” Ronon said. He patted Rodney’s shoulder again before letting up. Rodney sat up straight at the edge of his seat to escape the casual harassment. He shot a dirty look up at his teammate for it. Every project that Rodney hadn’t been able to work on for the last near a month screamed at him in his head as he looked guiltily at Weir’s desk blotter. His pride caught up and he shrugged it off.

“Of course I’m in. But I liked it better when Elizabeth was asking,” he said, indignant and annoyed. Behind him, Ronon easily reached out and patted him on the head.

“Oh, I wasn’t asking,” said Ronon. “We’re going.”

*~*~*

Sheppard had his bag packed inside of a half an hour. He couldn’t quite come to terms with having to give up Atlantis, but he could follow orders. That made the whole thing a little easier, maybe. Just following orders was easier than thinking about the odds that he wouldn’t see the city again. Bureaucratic red tape was great at strangling plans like that, but if Caldwell could order him back to Earth, maybe the Colonel would order him back to Atlantis, too.

With his senses all on overdrive, Sheppard couldn't really hear the city anymore. Usually there was an energy, a buzz he could feel in his system better than a double shot of espresso. It was the same kind of energy exchange he got from the city's chair, or when piloting a jumper. It was almost as if the city stayed tapped in and checking on him, even when he wasn't asking it to do things. Sheppard just figured he liked Atlantis, and it was her way of saying she called him a friend, too.

Rodney said he was stupidly assigning human characteristics to an entire city, and yeah, maybe he was right, but the big-brained idiot couldn't feel it. And now Sheppard knew what that felt like, that _lack_. All he felt was static, constant input, everything was fuzzy and mostly hurt. Atlantis couldn't seem to get through it. He walked in the halls, waved his hands over sensors, interacted blindly out of habit, and couldn't feel that very grounding feedback from her. He missed her already. It was like being somewhere else, even though he was already home.

All the same, just in case he couldn’t make it back, Sheppard found himself on one of the patios outside the mess hall again, risking another lock up for the last daylight view of the city.

A plate of food sat in front of him, but it was mostly just an excuse to sit at the table undisturbed. More mashed potatoes and unseasoned stew. Carson was either trying to help John stay out of trouble, or he was determined to make him starve to death on the bland diet, but Sheppard had kept his promise, never once complained. Making faces as the tray was handed over to him didn’t count as _complaining_.

He wasn’t exactly surprised when Ronon tracked him down. The big guy had a pack over his shoulder, and he helped himself to a chair across from Sheppard without explanation.

“So. When do we leave?” he asked. Sheppard raised an eyebrow at him.

“We’re leaving?” he asked, obvious emphasis on the ‘we’ part.

“Yep. Earth. For Training. With you,” said Ronon. He was thankfully being his quiet self, not the boisterous and loud that usually went along with the particular smug smile he was wearing. It was the one that tended to make Sheppard wonder what Dex knew. Because he usually knew something.

“What about the city? I think this place could use you while I’m out,” said Sheppard.

“I figure that’s just more incentive to go. We don’t get back until you learn whatever they say you have to know, so... you’ll learn it faster. You can’t count on me to clean up after you back here when I’m kicking ass on Earth,” said Ronon. His effort was amusing at least.

“It’s not that kind of training. If you want to get your ass kicked, stay here and spar with Teyla,” Sheppard returned.

“She’s on the team. She goes,” Ronon said. “And it’s Weir’s orders, so you can’t talk your way out of it.”

That figured. John had been running into that a lot. He scratched at the rash on his wrist, distracted again. That’s when he noticed the strap on Ronon’s wrist where he leaned on the table. The cuff was glowing. And then it disappeared. Gone. Sheppard looked from the missing cuff to Ronon.

“You saw that, right?” he asked, not for the first time that week questioning his own sanity. Ronon looked down at his wrist. He poked at his own skin, no leather strap running interference.

“Huh,” he said. Like he wasn’t terribly surprised by it. Sheppard reached across the table to take the man’s wrist and confirm for himself. Ronon thankfully allowed it, but he looked at Sheppard a little sideways for the intrusion. Sheppard let go of his wrist to snap fingers at him, expectantly.

“Let me see your radio. Carson’s still got mine,” he said. Ronon seemed confused but he handed it over. Sheppard kept it in front of his face, between them, as he triggered the mic.

“McKay... tell me you did that.”

“Captured an organic piece of indestructible alien hide in semi-permanent digital stasis until such time as we can figure out a way to properly analyze it and replicate it in the future? That, that? Yes. That, I just did,” came the smug reply from the tiny speaker.

“Great! Now do it again,” replied John.

“I’ve still got a half an hour,” said McKay, and Sheppard considered maybe someday personally killing the man. Maybe. Just a little bit.

“Rodney...”

The only answer he got was to witness the remaining cuffs disappear from Ronon’s person. Sheppard gave the radio back and waited, staring at his own wrists on the table. It took a minute, but the slight glow happened just before the organic alien tech disappeared, one by one. Then he stared at ragged bandages, poked at the edge of the rash, trying to confirm what was still there and what wasn’t. He tried willing the rashes away just as he had willed away the cuffs, but it didn’t have the same impact without Rodney’s help. He couldn’t win them all.

And that was a definite win. He was game for that trend to continue again.

“Now was that so damn difficult?” Sheppard muttered to himself, figuring Rodney expected it of him at this point. Something that had been bothering him for weeks had disappeared less than two hours after he lit a fire under the scientist’s ass, however accidental the minor breakdown had been. It was how McKay worked.

Sheppard scratched at the bandage, pretty sure the itch was more psychosomatic at this point, and not caring. It would be gone soon. Finally. He looked over the railing, out at the water, and squinted at the sun in his eyes. But he didn’t lock up, and he could enjoy it. Then he looked back to Ronon, a grateful smile on his face.

“Tomorrow,” he said, finally getting back to Ronon’s earlier question. “We leave on the Daedalus tomorrow.”

*~*~*

**Earth: Beacon Hills, California**

The Argents actually seemed to mean it when they said they wanted to help. At least, the ones that weren’t Gerard Argent; Stiles climbed out on the roof if he heard that old man’s voice in the house.

When Stiles tried to skip meal times at first, Victoria Argent personally retrieved him from his room, but that was the only time things ever got scary. Stiles was able to attend digital classes instead of leaving the house. Aside from the generalized existence of Gerard Argent, it was the safest he had felt in months.

The social worker checked up on him every week, and would randomly drop in to take him to the clinic for drug testing. Had to be sure there was no relapse to his mythical ketamine addiction. Stiles suffered through it just so that, eventually, they would have to either 1) apologize for labeling him an addict, or B) admit how much money they were wasting on a non-existent problem.

Neither were likely, but it was the best he could hope for from the system in Beacon Hills.

And somehow, against all logic, Stiles slept soundly under the Argent’s roof, something that hadn’t happened in a few months at least.

He took himself out for walks in the woods in broad daylight, when he knew his former friends would be busy in class. Derek Hale would meet him out there instead when he wasn’t stuck chasing werewolf-problems around since Boyd and Cora had shown up.

Stiles wanted to build a listening device and hide it in the Argent’s basement, but Derek wouldn’t let him risk it. He said Stiles could use his own eyes and ears to spy if he wanted to, but only because he would at least be able to use his mouth to talk himself out of trouble for it.

It highlighted part of the problem Stiles found himself in since his dad had been killed. Stiles had no money of his own. His credit cards and bank account all had his dad as a cosigner, so everything was frozen in probate. Which meant Stiles couldn’t even buy himself lunch if he were hungry, let alone the electronics required to build a bug.

On the days they met up, Derek usually brought him lunch, though. The guy was a lot nicer than Scott would ever give him credit for.

Stiles texted Derek daily, on the burner phone Derek had paid for, and if he forgot, Derek would check in first. Stiles had intentionally forgotten a few times, just to check, and Derek sent a text before eleven AM each time. Other times, Stiles would climb out onto the roof at night and call him. Derek never gave him any shit for being a dumb kid who didn’t know how to deal with being on his own.

The only time Derek called him, though, was when he absolutely needed help and had no other option. It was just like before, but there was decidedly less life-threatening commentary exchanged between them. Stiles actually wanted to help this time, because Derek had wanted to help him.

Stiles went out that night and lied to Chris Argent’s face when he told him that he wanted to go out to see a movie. It wasn’t that late, just after sunset, and Stiles had his bike. Instead of hit up the theater, however, he met Derek in a downtown alley a few blocks away from it.

The pair of them spent the next hour there, with Derek hiding and nursing a bloody shoulder, and Stiles digging through a dumpster for a handgun. The hunter who had shot him had dropped it when he fell off the fire escape above it, because hunters couldn’t do werewolf parkour even when their lives depended on it. It was enough to turn the odds on their cat-and-mouse game, and the hunter stopped chasing Derek after that to start running away instead. But Derek hadn’t been able to find the gun before his vision started blurring, and he and his sister already weren’t exactly talking.

Stiles Stilinski wasn't exactly a social genius, but Derek Hale really sucked at making new friends.

He was cranky and definitely shot, but at least they knew what to do with the aconite poisoning this time. It was just a matter of finding the extra bullets in the damn gun, and of course it was apparently another day or two until trash day for that particular dumpster.

“Maybe I should just go steal some from the house,” Stiles suggested. He wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about going looking in the basement for the hunters' particular personal blend of bullets, but digging through the dumpster wasn’t much better. All it would take was one bag ripping open and splattering on his clothes to bring up a bunch of questions he didn’t want to answer about a movie he obviously wasn’t sitting in a theater watching, with spending money he didn’t have. His odds of survival between the basement and the dumpster mess were probably about even.

“No, I know he dropped it in there,” said Derek. He was crouched in the shadows across the alley, staying out of sight in case anyone was following Stiles after the dumb lie.

So Stiles stayed in the dumpster until he found the gun. When he did, he knew enough to clear the weapon safely, and then stole the bullets out of the magazine. He left the empty gun at the bottom of the dumpster in the moldy, smelly slime he had found it in.

That night, they stashed six aconite-packed bullets at Derek’s place in case of future fights, and they got the bullet out of his arm again. Stiles managed not to faint this time, too. He didn’t want to go back to the Argents’ afterward, though, so he texted another lie to his benevolent foster-hunters. Argent didn’t bother calling bullshit about it, either.

“What’d you tell him?” Derek demanded, cranky but conscious. Stiles shrugged it off.

“Told him I was gonna stay at my girlfriend’s place and would be back in the daylight,” Stiles said. And Argent knew Stiles was more or less done with night time travel because of the odds of running into people he would rather avoid, so he thought the message had enough truth in it to fly under the radar.

“Shit, Stiles...”

Stiles resolutely ignored the sourwolf on the other end of the couch. “Whatever. My bike is up here with me. No one knows where I am.”

“Except Allison knows Lydia, and Lydia knows every girl-friend at the school. Learn to lie, damnit. No one will back you up on that,” said Derek. Stiles looked doubly insulted.

“You don’t know that,” he said. “And I _can_ lie.”

“Not about getting laid,” replied Derek.

He wasn’t exactly wrong. But Stiles was confident in the wealth of internet-based knowledge he had on the subject and stuck to his story.

After that night, the Argents didn’t ask him where he went as often. Allison was the only one who pressed him for details, and Stiles lied again, said his new girl was the daughter of one of the dispatchers at the Sheriff’s department and she lived a few cities over in Corning. Sufficiently rural and none of the Argents went near the topic of the sheriff’s department with a ten foot pole anymore. All investigations into his story stopped for good.

Over the next few weeks, Stiles started staying with Derek on the weekends because nobody asked a question about it. They just wanted to make sure his school work was done before he could disappear for a few days.

Stiles made sure to spend the full moon out of the Argents’ place, too, just to make sure no one thought he was running around with the werewolves. He wasn’t. He was sitting on a werewolf’s couch, playing WoW on a werewolf’s high-speed internet, but he wasn’t running around in any danger on their happy-hunting nights. Instead, Stiles was on-call, babysitting the aconite bullets, eating all the chips and ice cream he could find in the kitchen, while Derek was out in the mess helping Scott keep the baby wolves from killing anyone.

When Derek got back, he looked like he had gone a few rounds with someone bigger than him, and he curled up on the couch and slept it off with his head in Stiles’ lap. It did terrible things to Stiles’ insides and he didn’t get any sleep at all until he went back to the Argents’ the next night.

*~*~*


	6. Chapter 6

**Pegasus Galaxy: The Daedalus**

Stocked, supplied, and burdened with five new crew for the trip, the Daedalus left on schedule the next day. Sheppard watched as Rodney and Carson took to their temporary assignment posts embedded on the ship, doing their science and medical genius things. Neither of them were military, but the Daedalus crew let them step up and pull rank when needed, or when Rodney got loud, whichever. It was a matter of pride for Lt. Colonel Sheppard that the Atlantis crew, for all it’s oddities, was welcome and important there.

Sheppard’s pride was otherwise pretty bruised up on the ship, turning some funny colors on him as the lightyears disappeared. The idle uselessness wasn’t something he was used to, and it wasn’t exactly a vacation.

Caldwell allowed Colonel Sheppard on the command deck at the start of the run. John would take short shifts, just as a consult, keeping aware of anything they encountered that might need flagged for Atlantis. There wasn’t much. As long as the city stayed off the Wraith’s radar, things would stay quiet, and Caldwell knew that. It was an unexpected courtesy.

The fourth day on the ship, Sheppard went into a sneezing fit on the command deck because someone walked in wearing too much cologne, or formaldehyde, or something. He left the room still coughing on whatever it was. Caldwell still ordered him to medbay for it.

It was the little things that added up to big problems, John learned as time went on. Walking around in sunglasses was necessary in some areas, overkill in others. Sometimes the glasses couldn’t cut the glare of ambient light in a room and he was left squinting through it. The only difference between success or failure was the brightness of the room, the sound saturation in the room, whether or not the environmental controls were consistent with the rest of the ship, what Sheppard had eaten for lunch that hour, how solid the shielding was on some of the more voodoo-looking ancient tech clinging to the walls... who the hell knew, but John sure didn’t.

He could tell by the feel of the ship under his feet and the sound of the engines, under all the beeps and swooshes and talking voices when hyperdrive was on point and when it had some bugs, which was weird. He asked Rodney what a particularly delayed catch in a particular pitch meant, just from idle curiosity, and the scientist nearly had a heart attack right in front of him.

“We have the most sensitive technology in existence working on this ship,” he went on to rant at a computer when he thought John wasn’t around. “I should not find out from an off-duty _rent-a-cop_ that there’s an acceleration in the hyperdrive manifold, damnit.”

John thought about reminding him that he could hear him, but it wasn’t something he was comfortable with himself yet, and he wasn’t about to try to explain it to Rodney. Sheppard wasn’t even offended by it. He was little more than a rent-a-cop on the Daedalus, and an unarmed one at that. Earth policy was in effect on an Earth ship, and that meant that until he was cleared by the Sentinel Project, there would be _No_ weapons, _No_ radios, _No_ assignments. Caldwell mostly stuck to it. Sheppard’s sneezing fits didn’t help his case any, and he knew it, so he didn’t argue with the orders.

There was one exception.

On day five, just shy of two weeks since Sheppard’s last prison planet experience, the Daedalus crossed paths with a Wraith transport ship. It showed up on sensors early, and the Daedalus had time to disappear.

“Can you handle the chair if we need it?” Colonel Caldwell asked.

“Yessir,” said Sheppard.

“Go,” Caldwell ordered. Then, as Sheppard was running toward the Ancients' control chair room, he heard Caldwell order Carson to meet Sheppard there, just in case something happened.

Sheppard didn’t even think to complain about the babysitter. He had been stuck with Carson telling him not to touch anything for weeks since getting back to Atlantis, so he was used to it. Carson met him at the chair, just to supervise, and nervous as hell from the looks of him.

John took a seat and the familiar Ancient tech did it’s thing, like usual. Blue lights, pop up display windows, cozy recliner features, everything perfectly normal. In the chair, with direct contact, he felt a tiny slice of the energy feedback he missed so much from Atlantis. Sheppard felt all warm and fuzzy inside at the thought that the ATA gene at least hadn’t abandoned him in the crazy noise of the last few weeks.

As the transport got closer, Sheppard could see the life signs on board. Only fifty souls, and those were pretty faint.

“Stasis?” he asked, more thinking out loud at Carson than anything. He glanced over and saw Rodney and his tablet had joined the doctor to babysit. Also not surprising.

“Well, that doesn’t make sense,” said Rodney. “A ship that size can store hundreds.”

“Aye. Ship functions must be damaged,” Carson added in.

They could all see very clearly what the pop up display was reporting, so Sheppard shrugged the oddity off. A vital blow to the Wraith’s life support functions could have reduced the numbers. A moment later, the display showed a heat map of the Wraith ship, with data scrolling on chemical compositions in reachable areas.

Rodney made a strangled noise. “What the hell-”

“Did you do that?” Carson asked Sheppard at the same time.

“We are still way too far out for that,” said McKay, already madly at work on his tablet. “There is no possible way...”

The readings moved deck by deck across the Wraith ship. Sheppard stared at the display, just as shocked as the other two.

“I just wanted to know if anyone was alive in there,” he said, the only explanation he had for the readout they were all seeing.

“Based on those numbers, no. Not for long,” said Carson.

“But those numbers can’t be accurate. The Daedalus is still too far out to collect those readings,” Rodney insisted. Sheppard made the mistake of wondering how the readings were possible, and the display took up over half the viewing area to show rows and lines of hybrid computer and DNA code.

“Colonel Sheppard, I think ye had enough time in the chair for the day...” Carson waved him out, his tone and expression showing open concern and suspicion.

“What the hell is going on?” came Caldwell’s voice over McKay and Beckett’s radios. Sheppard heard him just fine and cringed despite himself.

McKay didn’t have any solid answers but he was programmed to think out loud. “Colonel, I think Colonel Sheppard just tapped into the scanners on some kind of back door -”

“Or he’s amplifying them,” said Carson. “He’s not been immersed in Ancient technology since before the planet. If the Daedalus can interact with the ATA, it can interact with the ProX.”

Even McKay froze up at that, looking up at John in open surprise that was actually quite common from him when things went so badly sideways. The speechless part was new, though.

“All I want to know is if we’ve been detected,” said Caldwell over the radio.

“There’s no one alive to detect us,” Carson said, relaying the memo the command deck missed because Sheppard wasn’t allowed a radio.

The response from the command deck was to order a jump. John was still exploring in the command chair, not paying attention to the radio anymore. Carson and McKay both physically dragged him from the chair before the jump to hyperdrive could screw up whatever overload of input was being sent to the display and the Daedalus computer because of Sheppard’s augmented coding.

“I wasn’t going to break anything,” said John, annoyed.

“Aye, but I don’t want to know what happens when you lock up while in that chair,” Carson said. “Also? Medbay. Now.”

The order was offensive and, among other things, entirely unwarranted. “What?!”

“No, no - he’s right. Go with Carson,” said Rodney. “You were amplifying the sensors. It’s right here in the code you showed us.”

McKay turned the tablet so John could read it, but the jumble of symbols made no sense to him.

“That’s not possible,” said Sheppard. McKay nodded.

“Look, I’m with you on that. But... from what I’m seeing here, initial assessment? The Daedalus was just using you as a power source. You really should get checked out, Colonel.”

Until that point, funny senses aside, John Sheppard had felt as at home on the Daedalus as he did anywhere else. He was okay aside from the odd headache, or sneeze, or sudden, inexplicable cold flash giving him the creeps. But the Daedalus somehow tapping power from his genetic code changed Sheppard’s worldview just enough that he decided to stop arguing.

Caldwell, Beckett, and McKay came to the conclusion after that, that until they knew more about how the ProX-active ATA worked with the ship, Sheppard should avoid all essential areas of the ship. Which meant he could go to his quarters, the mess hall, and the infirmary. He had to ask permission to train with Ronon and Teyla because the gym area was near an engine mechanical control room.

It was less than ideal. In fact, it sucked.

John made it his mission to repress the boost to the senses that came with the Sentinel gene. It probably would have been smarter to have spent the time on the ship looking up more to read about the problem, really, but that still seemed too much like accepting a fate he didn’t want.

What Sheppard knew about the Sentinel Project couldn’t fill up a water bottle. The agents all had the gene, which boosted four or more senses, and it didn’t matter which senses. Some of them could see ghosts, or get a read on natural energy readings that were usually off the human visual spectrum.

And because of this super power, they could overhear conversations without bugs or listening devices. They could read file information from outside a room if someone left a window open. They could do almost all of the things that the US military especially didn’t want the average enlisted grunt to be doing. And they had the marksmanship skills that nobody wanted to argue with. They were a special class of elite, and the Sentinel Project existed to keep them on a leash.

If there was anything John knew about himself, it was that he didn’t live on leashes very well. And if the only thing he got in return from it was some kind of superhuman senses, he just didn’t have to use them how anyone wanted him to.

The sunglasses became a permanent fashion accessory, and Sheppard found that the dense ear plugs used by the scientists and crew who had to spend any time around the ship’s larger moving parts could helpfully cut down on the number of painful auditory surprises. It kept his senses quiet, and he didn’t get in trouble for locking up.

Except the time he tried the lemon meringue in the mess hall.  
And he got severely motion sick once or twice, but only on the outer decks, with the big shielded windows that amplified and distorted the view.  
And he learned the hard way that it was best to wear his jacket at all times.  
And to avoid populated places with people who preferred to wear smelly things in tight spaces.

In general, Lt. Colonel Sheppard found his trip back to Earth informational, miserable, and long.  
He was screwed.

*~*~*

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

  
There was no preamble when the Daedalus got back in Earth orbit. Sheppard was told to collect his things and meet with Caldwell at the first ready Jumper. The Colonel set him up with a pilot, and sent Carson along to make sure Sheppard didn’t try to talk his way into taking the cloaked ship on a joyride over Colorado. That meant that the rest of the Atlantis team went along, too, with Carson as their Atlantis-appointed babysitter.

“What about you?” Sheppard asked, somewhat surprised when Caldwell didn’t move to claim the co-pilot’s seat. The Colonel waved it off.

“I’ll meet you down there. I’ve got things to wrap up, so I’ll need the extra time. I’ll transport down when you get there,” he said.

Sheppard’s only complaint about the arrangement, once the shuttle doors were closed and everyone’s seats and trays were in their mandated upright and stashed position, was that no one would let him fly the jumper down himself. Carson even took the co-pilot’s chair so John couldn’t confuse the jumper.

A half an hour later, they were waved into an underground hangar, one with plenty of clearance for the Ancient’s cloaking tech to go unnoticed. They were met by Major General Landry’s aide, somebody John didn’t know and figured was unlikely to ever have to meet again, and the one and only Sam Carter to at least make it a welcoming committee.

Carter was her usual smiling self, but she seemed unsettled about something and not at all inclined to talk about it around any representation of the top brass. There was little elevator chatter on the way, which was a surprise to Sheppard at least. McKay stood two feet away from Sam Carter and somehow wasn’t taking the opportunity to tell her about any of his recent genius, or about the time a month earlier when he was almost a human s'more.

Sheppard wasn’t going to complain about the quiet, but it was damn awkward.

“This is just a trip to Landry’s office, right?” he finally asked. “Nobody died?”

The humor didn’t quite fall flat; the crowd got the message, but there wasn’t much more than a half-hearted smile for the effort.

“Well, this wasn’t the eventual homecoming anyone had in mind as a possibility for AR-1 when Jack bullied you into going to Atlantis a couple years ago,” Sam offered.

“O’Neill didn’t bully-” Sheppard paused at a look from Sam. “Okay, maybe a little. But still. It’s not like this is my fault. Or anybody else’s.”

From the back of the elevator, Rodney offered up, “Actually, we don’t know that. The ProX activation could have been influenced by one of your Ascended girlfriends. Some kind of... Alien STD. It actually could still be your fault.”

Sheppard took the hat off his own head, reached back over Teyla’s just enough to smack McKay in the side of the head with it. There were perks to being the unarmed, off-duty, rent-a-cop when it meant he could retaliate against McKay’s brand of petty with his own.

“Scuse me,” he muttered as a polite apology to everyone in the small room except Rodney. Samantha kindly pretended she hadn’t seen a thing.

“I was just saying, you don’t know,” Rodney complained. He moved a little further into the corner, shuffled around to put Carson between himself and Sheppard. The elevator slowed.

“Right. So. Rodney, Teyla, Ronon? You’re with me. I’ll show you to your guest quarters for now. And Colonel Sheppard... Dr. Beckett... Good luck with the General,” she said. She sounded like she meant it, too, which was less than heartening.

The team split up when the elevator stopped, with Sam leading her group to the left as Landry’s aid headed to the right. The SGC was still a maze that made Sheppard nervous, so he made sure to stay up with the class.

As promised, when they showed up at the conference room, Caldwell was already there. Landry, too, of course. Sheppard pasted on a smile and tried not to be a robot at a meeting he wanted no part in. He just sat down and took his sunglasses off without having to be ordered to first.

“Any updates?” Landry asked, getting right to work after the pleasantries had passed around. It was at least nice to see that no one was any happier about the pending reassignment than Sheppard himself. It made things easier.

“After a relaxed quarantine period, nothing has changed,” said Caldwell. “The other members of his team are fine. You’ve seen the lab results from all of them. All potential outside causes have been ruled out. The ProX has been confirmed.”

“Three times,” added Carson, still unhappy about it. Sheppard just kept his mouth shut.

“And Colonel Sheppard and Dr. Beckett worked with Dr. Stevens on board the Daedalus. The second opinion is the same as the first,” said Caldwell.

Landry accepted the report, thoughtful and quiet. He looked over a tablet that likely had John’s medical record printed on the screen with the same information. The meeting was a formality.

“Well. The percentages are within range for the Sentinel Project’s guidelines,” Major General Landry finally said. He looked up to include Sheppard in the conversation. “So it is down to you, Colonel. What do you want to do?”

The question surprised him, and Sheppard took a moment to be sure he heard it correctly. “Given the option, I want to go back to Atlantis and get on with the mission there, sir. If it means we go back in time a month, I’ll take it. I could put McKay on it and between him and Carter, I’m sure they’d have something actionable inside of a week.”

Landry laughed, quietly amused by what he thought was a joke, but Caldwell stared at the ceiling as Sheppard went back to a now familiar avoidance track. Carson seemed to be considering it as a possibility.

“At this point, all I can offer you is an opportunity to retire, with your rank and record intact, for a medical discharge, or start your transition to the Sentinel Project,” said Landry. The earlier humor faded to a cautious sobriety.

“Either way, given your record, I need to impress upon you the importance of the fact that this condition grounds you, civilian or military. You will have to register the Sentinel status with the FAA, the DMV, and local law enforcement wherever you settle if you choose to retire. You’ll need to update all licenses and identification, regardless of the path you choose. You can never fly a plane again.”

That wasn’t something John had fully considered until that point.

“Wait - _what_?” he asked. He looked to Carson, who looked very much like he wanted to ooze into a crevice in the linoleum floor and never been seen again. He had been sitting on that particular piece of info for _weeks_.

Caldwell and Landry both watched Sheppard, cautious and braced for an explosion. They knew what the impact of the words would be. They were pilots. They knew.

Sheppard should have done more research. He would have probably changed his name and moved in with the Genii if someone had told him he could never fly again at the start of everything.

Which was why no one from Atlantis had dared mention anything about it to him before they had the backing of the Major General. Telling a pilot he could never again operate a multi-million dollar toy capable of flight anywhere he wanted at well over his preferred 200mph minimum was about on par with telling the doctor next to him that he could never again pick up a stethoscope.

“That’s - Look, that is not... What am I supposed to do, then? Nobody will even give me a headset,” said Sheppard. It was the most rational, socially acceptable reaction he could muster. Logic. Follow the work. Focus. He had value that they would lose if they insisted on following some mythical policy, damnit. Somebody had to see that.

That was probably why the retirement offer was on the table.

“What about after training?” asked Carson.

“Depends on the Sentinel Project directors,” said Landry. “We can put in the request, but who knows what they’ll run with in the end.”

Sheppard wanted nothing more than to walk out of the room. It was stuffy suddenly, far too small in the conference room. The realization that he needed to hear the ocean only made the sensation worse.

“Colonel,” came Caldwell’s voice. He was trying to get John’s attention. Shit, was Sheppard starting to lock up? John looked to the Colonel sharply, trying to prove he was fine. Caldwell leaned back, tapped a hand on the table as a tell; he was anxious.

“Colonel, you were put on life support somewhere in the neighborhood of four times on the Daedalus alone,” Caldwell said, being very careful with the topic. “If you were looking at one of your team’s files, if they blacked out even twice on a mission... would you risk their lives, and maybe the lives of anyone with them, by letting them stay in the field? With even one of these risk factors, let alone the full list.”

Sheppard had to work to focus on a hypothetical. “That’s a hard call. I couldn’t replace Ronon Dex with the next in line, so I would have to assess the risks one on one...”

Caldwell sighed, the non-answer not what he was after. He tried again. “If Major Lorne started blacking out every time he walked through the gate, would you trust him to take McKay and Beckett off-world?”

“Hell no.”

Sheppard didn’t even have to think about it. And the silence that followed was telling. Everyone waited for it to sink in for John Sheppard. They weren’t overly pushy about it, either. He caught on only reluctantly. He leaned forward on the edge of his seat, arms on the table as he stared at the surface just below his fingertips. He tapped an anxious beat and tried not to get too focused on the fake wood grain under the resin.

Grounded.

He was only 43 years old, and that was too young to retire for anybody. And he wasn’t going to accept failure as his last mission report.

“Fine. What do I have to do for this Sentinel thing? The training will take care of it, right?” Sheppard asked, looking up at the General. “But I want to come back.”

Landry nodded. “Someone will be out this afternoon to get you set up. They’re based out in California, so you’ll be assigned there and relocated today.”

Carson coughed politely, raised a few fingers off the table in a quiet bid for an audience with the General. “Did Director Weir discuss her plans with you, General?” he asked. Landry leaned back in his chair rather than confirm or deny conversations with the Director to her men. Carson helpfully went on. “She wants Colonel Sheppard’s team training with him. So they’re all ready to go back to the field.”

“Not my call.”

“And I’ll need at least a primer on medical concerns associated with this. We’re a long way from home, I don’t want to be stumbling around blind if the Sentinel Project has answers here.”

“That’s all up to the project managers, Doctor,” the General replied.

“Aye. I just thought ye should know. That’s our orders. Rodney and I, we expect the team to leave when he does. Not before.”

Landry replied with a knowing smile. “Doctor, good luck keeping up with AR-1. I would not want to be in either yours or Weir’s shoes if SG-1 ever found their way into similar circumstances.”

“General, I wouldn’t wish this mess on an enemy,” said Carson on a reluctant sigh.

*~*~*

With the decision formally and officially made, John Sheppard was no longer a member of the SGC. Technically. He existed in this little Shroedinger pocket, pending some bureaucratic red tape finish line, and he would return to the Stargate program once the training was certified. In the meantime, it meant no wandering the base.

Sheppard had his own personal escort, and the lucky bastard got a radio and a gun. And Sheppard didn’t even own a cell phone anymore.

The whole Sentinel superpowers package came with a huge disabling blow to anything Sheppard had resembling a social life, as well as his career. Which probably said nothing good about his social life to start with.

Sitting in his assigned guest quarters, Sheppard finally - after a little over a month of stubborn refusal - asked for something to read about the Sentinel thing. Carson emailed him a file. At least Sheppard was still allowed to use a tablet.

When he got back to Atlantis, though, he was stealing a radio if he had to.

The file was essentially an operations guide to utilizing a Sentinel on a team, and it was not written from the perspective of anyone who actually had to live with augmented senses. None of the pages and pages of rules and regulations actually had anything useful to John.

They did highlight a few problems, though, and had him rather angrily reconsidering the offer of retirement.

John had worked special ops in his lifetime before Atlantis, and some of the teams he had worked with included Sentinels. He just hadn’t known that at the time.

The policies manual Carson sent him highlighted the requirement of a visual marker on Sentinel Project members. Legally, it had to be voluntary. But the agreement to the marker was buried in the fine print.

By agreeing to join the project, John had agreed to receive the same marking tattoo that he had seen on the Sentinels he had worked with in Special Ops. It was a large, black and red team logo on the back of the Sentinel’s right hand, easily seen whether in uniform or out, so anyone who saw it knew they were in the presence of a human lie detector and spy.

The tattoos had stood out at the time because Sheppard was young and stupid and thought they looked cool. He liked the interlocking, fragmented design of the eagle encircled by its own wings. Now that he knew it wasn’t a team tatt, that it was there as a warning to everyone on the chain of command, Sheppard was annoyed at his own ignorance. Someone should have told him.

At least McKay had been able to get rid of the handcuffs eventually. A tattoo was very permanent.

But if Sheppard couldn’t wrap his head around a stupid tattoo, Ronon Dex would call him all kinds of a coward.

Damn.

Fine. He would get the stupid tattoo. Nobody on Atlantis had to know what it meant, anyway.

The only other useful thing he learned from the Sentinel Project’s command manual was that Sentinel were considered unstable without the grounding presence of a permanent partner. What Sheppard called “locking up”, the Sentinel know-it-alls called a _zone out_. And zone outs were statistically more likely to happen without that partner, or the person they called the Sentinel’s Guide.

That was a problem for Sheppard. He had a team, and he had a whole city of people to keep track of. It so far didn’t matter if he was in the middle of a crowd or on his own, the zone outs happened. He was ungrounded and unstable. No guide.

He was okay with not being stuck to a partner, however, because the Sentinel Project had an entire section of rules that outlined the importance of the guide. A sentinel and guide team were stronger, more capable, and it amplified the sentinel’s senses. There was a huge priority placed on the guide. Where the guide went, the sentinel followed, not the other way around. The guide got the radios and the guns, and - incidentally - the sentinel’s Power of Attorney and all the same legal benefits of a spouse. All of them. DADT didn’t apply to anyone with the sentinel tattoo, because of the proven benefit of and reliance on a guide.

Sheppard called bullshit. He would rather be unstable and half-strength than sign his life over to somebody like that. John Sheppard relied on himself.

The other rules were similarly dismissive, in John’s opinion. The sentinel was treated like a problem, generally, that would eventually pay off for the project when handled appropriately. Managers with sentinel appointed to the team were advised to set the bar low, at the risk of wasting manpower on trips to the infirmary every time the overly sensitive sentinel sneezed.

“Exposure therapy” was the recommended standard, so if the sentinel had trouble with particular sounds or smells, the recommended course of action was to do nothing. The Sentinel Project trained autonomous teams. The sentinel and their guide, if a functioning team and trained correctly, would work out a solution without their supervisor’s intervention or interference with any non-gene carriers. The “NGC” were the protected class, according to the Sentinel Project’s policies.

For all the guidebook was a worthless rules and policy manual, it at least cleared up a few things for John. Carson and Elizabeth had read the file weeks ago. They had been negotiating for weeks to keep Sheppard - and Atlantis - out of the Project’s jurisdiction. Partly to prevent Sheppard being kicked to the sidelines like a weapon on a shelf that had to be left alone when it wasn’t in use, at the risk of explosion.

Sheppard was worth a hell of a lot to Atlantis. The Sentinel Project manual went to a lot of work to downplay a sentinel’s value to little more than tactical advantage in the political arena and certain policing capacities. For people who knew what Sheppard did on Atlantis, that dismissal wouldn’t track.

Nothing in the manual lined up for Sheppard. He wasn’t a fit candidate for their stupid program. The only reason he was being sent for training was because of a few percentage points on an arbitrary minimum table.

All John needed was for someone to show him how to not end up in a coma because of an “overloaded sensory episode” and maybe a few less headaches would be nice. He didn’t need a whole new set of rules and regs, or a new batch of bosses with new reports to write. It was an overreach that would just give this Sentinel Project access to the classified existence of Atlantis.

“This is bullshit,” Sheppard announced to his room, staring in disbelief at the tablet in front of him. “All of it.”

He didn’t know what to do about the fact that there was bullshit caked around his boots up to his ankles now that he had stepped in it, however.

As he sat on the edge of the desk and tried to make sense of the SGC’s caving to the Sentinel Project’s power-grab, someone pounded on his door. He set the tablet down to go open the door and stop the noise, but there was a “ _beep_!” and then the door opened on its own.

Rodney McKay stood at the door a moment, adjusting to the dim lights, before he spotted Sheppard across the room. Then he shoved the door closed again and moved closer, waving a tablet at John.

“Did you see this? This... this is bullshit,” he said at what passed for his mid-level volume “angry” voice. John raised an eyebrow at the adamant intrusion, crossed his arms and leaned back to wait out whatever science failings had offended McKay so thoroughly. This had to be a whole new level for Rodney to track Sheppard down when Sam Carter was literally just down the hall.

“What is?” he asked, game to play.

“This. Carson said he sent it to you,” said McKay.

That was genuinely surprising. Sheppard had to process this news longer than he thought reasonable. Why was any member of his team reading that worthless policy crap? Especially McKay. He generally had more important things to do than to read up on Sheppard’s problems. Sheppard generally had more important things to do than that, too, until recently anyway.

But at the same time... the manual was bullshit.

Sheppard kicked the rolling chair beside him over to McKay in an invitation for him to take a seat and commiserate with him about the bullshit.

“It is beyond bullshit. It’s completely irrelevant to anything we’ve got going on in Atlantis,” Sheppard agreed. He kept his opinions on the power-grab angle to himself, however, until he could talk to Weir face to face again. Security and politics were neither of them safe topics for Rodney McKay’s poor poker face.

"You aren't really going along with this, are you?" McKay asked, slouched in the chair like he was exhausted.

"I haven't exactly gone along with it up till now anyway," Sheppard pointed out. He was frankly lucky he hadn't been brought back to face a court martial again. But he shrugged it off. "It's my only way back to Atlantis. And once I'm there, this stuff... won't be important, as long as I can figure out how to not zone out or whatever. Maybe that's in the training."

McKay didn't Like it. He tossed the tablet up onto the desk next to the one Sheppard had been reading on. "To be perfectly frank, I know computer AIs with more individual rights than that says you'll have in this program. If I were you, I'd get a lawyer."

"It's a military program, McKay. And I'm an officer, not a contractor. I signed my rights away almost twenty years ago. I can't sue my way out of it now," Sheppard reminded him. He crossed his ankles and stared at his boots, offered a shrug to dismiss it. "Besides, according to them, I'm a lousy Sentinel without a Guide. So I can keep at least half my rights until I power up and my senses stabilize. And statistically, according to their numbers, that's not likely, so I should be fine."

"Oh, good. Everything is fine then. It's not like you're ever gonna need to carry a radio or a gun again," said McKay dryly. Sheppard took his point but didn't have any perspective on how to fix the problem yet.

"Or fly a plane. Landry said no matter what I chose to do, the gene grounds me without the Sentinel Project's authority. I've been flying planes half my life and now-"

"I would just like to be clear, briefly," McKay interrupted. "Puddle Jumpers are not and never will be classifiable as planes. Nor is the Daedalus, nor is Atlantis. They are ships. So... if some political pissant decided to make a rule that you, personally, can't fly planes, that's all well and good. Because you don't fly planes. You pilot ships. And they probably don't have the necessary clearance level to know the difference, let alone care what you do when you're back home."

That was actually somewhat of a relief to hear, even if it was a very small loophole that McKay was only pointing out because he was mad. It was at least an amusing loophole that Sheppard could happily present to Elizabeth Weir later on and maybe actually get away with.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Things will get back to normal when we get back home."

"And Weir wouldn't have wasted weeks of my valuable time, or Carson's time, sending us back with you if she didn't think it would pay off. They'll have to sign you back over to the SGC eventually," McKay reasoned. He looked up at Sheppard again with a shrug and a frown. "It's just on you not to screw up training. That can't be that hard."

Was that supposed to be Rodney's version of a pep talk? Sheppard blinked at him, tried to process the spirit behind the words before the actual words themselves. Outside in the hall, the babysitter with a gun started adding to the headache by going back and forth on his radio. Distracted, Sheppard gave up. "Gee, thanks, Rodney. I think."

There was another knock at the door then, this one an actual polite one, where the person on the other side of it waited to be acknowledged rather than get the babysitter to buzz him in. McKay sighed and rolled his chair out of the way as Sheppard stood up off the desk to go oblige the custom. He had heard the call on the radio anyway.

"Colonel, they're ready for you in the infirmary," his babysitter reported when the door was opened.

"What's in the infirmary?" Sheppard asked. It wasn't a place he wanted to go, if he didn't absolutely have to.

"Forward preparations for the Sentinel Project, sir. They said Dr. Beckett wants the medical stuff done on-site, here, so he can still be involved," the young sergeant reported.

_What the hell_ \- Sheppard frowned and looked over his shoulder, toward Rodney and the tablets with the policy manual on them. He didn't remember any "medical stuff" being mentioned. Rodney gave a frustrated sound, held up his right hand to point out the lack of a tattoo there. Oh. Right. There would be blood involved, so it was medical. Sheppard grudgingly nodded.

"Let me get my jacket," he told the kid outside. Rodney stared at him.

"You're really going through with this?" McKay asked. Sheppard nodded.

"If it's my only way home, yes," said Sheppard as he grabbed his coat off the bed. He was only going to the infirmary, but John had learned on the Daedalus that the jacket made a good shield to buffer his senses. "Besides, it's not my first tattoo, Rodney. I'll be fine."

There was a beat of quiet before Rodney looked up at him, surprised. "You've got a tattoo?"

John saw himself out without answering, only waved for the sergeant to lead the way.

*~*~*


	7. Chapter 7

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

There wasn't much Rodney could find through unofficial channels on the proper care and maintenance of a Sentinel. The internet, now that he was back on Earth, was strangely quiet about them.

A few online support groups, but that was mostly for holistic practices that were interested in treating it as a disability. Sheppard was a pain in the ass, but McKay couldn't call him any kind of disabled. A bunch of middle aged moms reaching out to each other about their sons' and daughters' chronic headaches and mood swings wasn't helpful. Neither was a bunch of bureaucratic BS in the form of a manager's operations manual.

The program had built in so much red tape and general static on the topic that the only way to get information was through the official training program. Their civilian program seemed entirely diversionary to funnel people into the government programs, which was essentially a gateway to any branch of the military and a big draw for law enforcement jobs. It was an American program, but they could probably put their hands on every stable Sentinel on the planet, at least long enough to do a threat assessment and then turn them loose on their own if they didn't warrant the interest.

It was irritating. And it technically wasn't McKay's business and Sheppard probably didn't appreciate the visit. McKay wasn't good with the moral support thing and everyone knew it, but Elizabeth had sent him anyway. John was still a friend and all Rodney saw, now that he was paying attention, was his friend being shoved around.

Even as far as a tattoo. Come _on_.

Rodney very clearly remembered Aubrey Hart's brief "trial" where a primitive society of prisoners and villagers declared her a threat over her unnatural blonde hair. What would the team run into on other planets if Sheppard's hand had an eagle on it? Red and black weren't exactly friendly, peaceful colors.

This was an inconvenience for the team, let alone for Sheppard.

But McKay saw very clearly that Sheppard - and his team - had to go through the training first, to find out if they could ever get out in the field again. If Sheppard could keep control of his senses, even to a fraction of what was implied in the Sentinel Project propaganda, that would be a huge asset to every mission. And if he couldn't, then the SGC would never let him through another gate. No third option.

So, to distract himself from the bureaucracy that Sheppard, Weir, and Carson had all been fighting for weeks, Rodney turned his attention to the things he could control. Like science. And physics. And wormhole technology.

Rodney dropped into the old pattern of bossing around Samantha Carter's lab team, arguing with her about math, correcting dry erase board equations, all fairly easily. She even asked for his help with something SG-1 had brought back. It was the wrong galaxy for him to be any use, but she tried.

And then Rodney realized he had been buried in the basement of the SGC for over eight hours, back on Earth nearly ten, and no one had stopped by to collect him. They were supposed to get moved to the Sentinel Project facilities with John, and they had been there nearly a day.

When he asked Carter about it, she frowned at him. "Rodney... Colonel Sheppard is still in the infirmary. I told you that, hours ago."

"Yes, for the tattoo, I know. It doesn't take this long for a tattoo," complained McKay. Then he looked up, considered it. "Does it? I've never been inclined..."

"Not in this instance, no," said Carter. "He was... well, I guess you could say admitted. He's been in a coma-state for hours now."

"What?! It's been days!"

"No, only a few hours," Carter tried to assure him. "He's got our team and Dr. Beckett-"

McKay shook his head, still annoyed at the news even though Carter softened the blow. "No, no... I mean days since he had one of those coma episodes. I thought he was better."

"Oh. This isn't something that just gets better, Rodney..."

McKay closed his laptop and tucked it away in his bag. "I'll go check with Carson."

And he did. He marched himself to the infirmary just like he had marched himself to John's guest quarters. He didn't have to knock that time. And he found Carson at a station right away, the doctor looking over numbers on a computer screen that likely had something to do with Sheppard.

"What happened to him?" McKay asked, rather than bother with hellos. Carson leaned on a tall chair, turned to look at Rodney like he somehow wasn't surprised.

"The tattoo caused more pain than he was expecting," said Carson. "He zoned out before the Project rep was half way through with it. So we got him on life support and we're monitoring him. Everything is alive and active, just as before. He's in there somewhere but... he can't seem to get back out of it."

"Well, what's the Sentinel Project representative say to do to get him out of it?" McKay asked, offended at the implication that the project's own experts didn't stick around to help.

"To do what we did," said Carson. He frowned, shook his head. "He said it's fairly common, especially when they're unstable as John is."

"John is stable," said Rodney, complaining and offended on Sheppard's behalf. "He just needs somebody to help him with more than some stupid tattoo-"

"Aye, not the kind I meant, but go see for yourself. He's as stable as I can make him until someone tells me something better," said Carson. He pointed around the corner, to another room, where Sheppard was half sat up on the bed, staring, eyes wide open and a grimace on his face under the oxygen mask.

"He's breathing?"

"Barely, but yes," replied Carson. He and Rodney both stepped closer to the door, enough to peek inside without disturbing anyone else in the sickbay. All of the monitors attached to John were silenced, and the lights were dimmed in his corner of the room, but McKay could plainly see the stress Sheppard's system was under that the silenced screens were desperately reporting.

"Why don't they have something better- why didn't they just transfer him to the experts now? Seems to me now would be a great time for some actual communication with these people," said McKay. Carson had no good answers to that question himself.

"We reported it, they said we can move him when he snaps out of it," said Carson. "General Landry was going to make some phone calls, try tae find someone with something more useful to contribute than a kid with a... a tattoo gun."

McKay crossed his arms, scowled at his watch instead of the doctor. "This is a new record, isn't it? Sam said it's been hours."

"He's never been under this long," confirmed Beckett. "Twenty minutes was the longest, and that was weeks ago. That first day he was in the infirmary after you left? He's gotten better about it since. Or at least, I thought."

"This is insulting," McKay said. "We crossed two galaxies to get help for this. Now it's no different, he's just not at home."

Carson nodded his agreement and sighed. There wasn't anything else he could do. He waved a hand toward Sheppard as he looked back at McKay. "Why don't ye go sit with him? Teyla and Ronon were already by an hour ago. According to everything we can tell, he can see and hear everyone. It may help."

McKay considered it. He finally pulled his bag from his shoulder and nodded, went in to claim the chair between the wall and Sheppard's bed. He noticed right away the plastic bandage wrapped around Sheppard's hand where it lay on the bed. It somehow seemed more insulting and yet par for the course that the Project representative had apparently finished the whole tattoo while Sheppard was zoned out. Maybe it made sense, maybe it was harmless. McKay didn't understand what caused the zone outs to know.

"This is not something I ever thought I would have to look into, you know," he told Sheppard, trying to convince himself that his friend could hear him. "And I haven't been able to find much. So if you get us kicked out of training before we even get there with this episode, we're all screwed. Lorne and Ronon don't get along well enough, the missions will suck."

McKay had just gotten settled, laptop out to resume the work he had been doing in the lab, when he noticed movement. He looked up to see Sheppard had moved the oxygen mask off his face on his own. None of the monitors had gone off because they had been silenced hours earlier when the readings were too high for the computers to accept.

"Hey... are you awake?" McKay asked, careful to be quiet. Sheppard didn't turn his head, but he looked over at him as confirmation. McKay looked to the door to call for Carson, surprised to see the doctor leaning in the doorway and watching them.

"Lorne doesn't get my team," said Sheppard. His voice sounded dry, like he had been yelling for hours instead of zoned out. McKay handed him a water bottle off the counter behind him. Sheppard gave him a thumbs up for the effort and downed half the bottle.

"You woke up just to put _that_ on the record?" McKay asked, surprised.

"Sure," said Sheppard. "That's why I woke up. Nothing to do with the fact that those lock- zone outs hurt. I just gotta save Lorne from Ronon."

"I didn't know you could hear anything when you were under," said McKay.

"I hear _everything_ ," said Sheppard. "I just can't so much understand any of it."

"Well, you understood that," offered McKay. "I wasn't even being very loud."

Sheppard nodded sagely as he tested out if he could still move his limbs. "You're always loud."

"Aye, I'll second that," said Carson. He finally approached and stood on the other side of the bed as Sheppard came to fuller awareness, helping his patient untangle from the monitors. "Careful. You've been under for a few hours at this point. Don't be in any hurry."

"Everything hurts, doc. Like I just ran a marathon. While breathing through a straw," said Sheppard. He noticed the plastic bandage on his hand and poked at it. "It's done?"

"You dinnae seem to notice, so he finished it up rather than put you through finishing it later," Carson replied.

"I told you, I should have tracked down some whiskey first. I would have been fine," said Sheppard. He considered it another moment before shrugging it off. "I don't know. It worked the first time, anyway."

"I think you'd find things have changed a bit since ye were twenty-five," the doctor said. It was probably a fair point. Sheppard didn't seem to appreciate the reminder.

"So now that he's awake, when are we leaving?" McKay asked. "The sooner this training starts, supposedly the sooner we no longer have to do this again."

"We?" echoed Sheppard, surprised if not amused.

"I'll go see if I cannae find Carter or the General... maybe they'll know more about how things are going behind the scenes. As of this afternoon, Homeworld Security had taken interest. Everything got impossibly more complicated... It's not my area," Carson said with a frustrated sigh.

"I can take you to Sam," McKay offered. He started putting away his laptop again.

"No, you stay here with John. Help keep him steady till I'm back," said Carson. He backed toward the door, pointing at Rodney to keep him in the chair. That was confusing.

"Steady- what? What am _I_ supposed to do?"

"Just you stay. I'll be right back."

McKay stayed where he was, not sure what the doctor was having a fit about. He looked to Sheppard and saw the man looked just as confused.

"You're okay now, right?" he asked. Sheppard seemed to take a mental inventory before he shrugged and nodded.

"Think so," he replied.

"Huh." McKay took a deep breath and buried his opinion rather than ramble. Sheppard sat on the bed, rubbing at the plastic over the inside of his palm as he looked up at the readings from the remaining monitors. He was still coming out of it, but he would be okay. McKay pulled his laptop back out of the bag again.

They sat in the relative quiet of the room and didn't bother each other. Sheppard watched the infirmary staff move in and out between sections, and McKay worked on editing an equation from Carter's team. He looked up every once in a while if Sheppard got too quiet, but he was always awake and aware.

"Hey... Rodney?" Sheppard asked after a few minutes. McKay only half looked up from the screen.

"Huh?" he said, admittedly distracted. Sheppard was quiet for a beat.

"Thanks for sticking around," he finally said. McKay hadn't been expecting that. He looked up then, saw that Sheppard had closed his eyes rather than stare at the ceiling. He didn't know what to say to it, muttered something he hoped was appropriately positive and reassuring. The math on the screen made infinitely more sense to Rodney than other humans did, though, so all he could do was guess.

*~*~*

**Earth: Beacon Hills, California**

The problem with lying, Stiles learned, was that eventually the lies always caught up with him.

After a little over a month of staying at the Argents, someone finally figured out that Stiles wasn't going to see his girlfriend every weekend. He was waylaid en route to Derek's loft just before sundown one Friday. Knocked off his bike by a dart to the arm and basically oblivious for at least an hour. He woke up in a dark box that couldn't be more than six by eight feet, but at least it had a high ceiling.

Someone kindly brought him food, eventually. A burly looking preppy kid with a shaved head and an annoying smile. Also, he had really big teeth that he liked to show off, which narrowed him down to definitely not-a-hunter. He taunted Stiles about his poor choice in boyfriends and made it sound very much like Derek wouldn't be alive much longer to miss him, but they still brought Stiles food every so often, and even let him out to use a bathroom. It was always too dark to see anything when he was let out, though.

That meant that the hunters Stiles lived with thought he was safe until he didn't come home. Three days later. It wasn't like Stiles’ phone had been left with him to call for help, or at least text the Argents to let them know he was going to miss Sunday dinner. The people who took him in to protect him from werewolves didn’t know for three days that he was in need of their help, because they believed him when he said he didn’t talk to any werewolves anymore. It was only one wolf he would talk to, really. But apparently that was enough.

It wasn't really a surprise that Stiles was taken down by werewolves rather than hunters, honestly. Hunters would never have figured it out. But after a month, Stiles smelled like Derek and Derek smelled like Stiles to the overly sensitive wolf-noses and their superhuman olfactory powers. The werewolves wanted bait and Stiles was a small, fleshy, breakable human that was easy to knock out when he wouldn’t shut up.

And because the assholes took him out with ketamine darts they had probably stolen from some hunters along the way, Stiles was almost glad to be locked up in a janitorial closet for God-knew how long. It had to be days. Either way, Social Worker Pantsuit was gonna be pissed. And Stiles didn’t want to start the blood tests all over again, so until it wore out of his system again, he could stay in his closet-box. Just a small black box that smelled like bleach and... why did he smell chocolate? He had to be losing it.

Stiles heard a lot of voices, locked up in the dark. There was a small line of light under the door, once he pulled the worn-out seal off the bottom, but not enough to see under it. The voices didn’t seem to be coming from the hall immediately outside the door. Some of them sounded like they were in the small room with him, which was mostly how Stiles knew when he was drugged and when the veterinarian-class medicines had faded.

He didn’t recognize some of the speakers. One of them sounded like his dad and Stiles spent at least a half an hour shouting at the door because of it. That was torture and it was against every law on every continent to use tricks like that against prisoners, war between werewolves or not. It wasn’t fair. Stiles had never done anything to whoever these people were to deserve that.

He heard Derek’s voice. He heard Scott’s voice. And Allison. He heard Chris Argent’s voice a few times, mostly saying some form of “ _I told you so._ ” Stiles really doubted his sanity by the time the door finally opened and stayed that way.

An entire group of the unknown werewolves stood around the door, a very effective deterrent against moving from the corner he had propped himself up in inside the room. With that many people crowded around, it wasn’t likely they were escorting him to a bathroom break.

It was dim light outside in the hall but he saw the leader wave him forward. She looked scary enough, with long claws on the end of her fingers that looked like they could do a fair amount of damage. Stiles was completely okay with staying where he was. At least the voices in the dark didn’t draw blood.

“What’s going on?” Stiles asked the werewolf that blocked the door. He had a hundred other questions, but he wasn’t sure even the simple one would be answered.

“It’s time for the reunions,” said the dark haired woman with the long nails and the creepy smile. She stepped into the room to make sure Stiles kept walking, pacing out after him and catching him by the arm to prevent him from wandering.

Stiles tried to pretend he didn’t squeak as the woman closed long claws over the back of his neck to steer him along where she wanted him to go. The building was huge, with marble floors that echoed as her claws clacked and scratched with every step. It looked half demolished, the only light in the building from the once impressive skylights. It looked like it used to be a bank, with a stately staircase that led down to a row of teller windows behind more marble countertops.

One of the younger, twin werewolves kicked a fallen chunk of a smashed desk down the stairs ahead of them over chipped stone and shattered glass. It caught Stiles’ attention and that hurt. Stiles tried to focus on keeping his neck from being sliced open by claws because he wasn’t going to heal as the werewolves could. His foggy brain couldn’t figure out where he was or what was going on, other than the fact that there were dangerous people shoving him around a dangerous place. The sharp claws sliced at his sides or at his neck if he stepped too far out of line or didn’t keep pace.

Stiles made a fist and started banging his hand against his thigh, anything to try clearing the medicine fog in his brain. He just needed to be able to focus and feel a little less floaty.

The group went in different directions when they hit the sidewalk. The sun was setting and there wasn’t much traffic on the street. They were definitely downtown. Only a block away from Derek’s place, as it turned out, because the werewolf bitch marched Stiles directly to the familiar territory. For the first time in months, Stiles didn’t want to be at Derek’s loft.

His werewolf kidnapper didn’t even knock on the door, just kicked it open. One of the werewolves had called the woman Kali, and Stiles figured that was as fitting a name as any for someone who was taking her time about deciding when to kill the small mortal pin-cushiony human in her grasp. She pushed Stiles into the loft and then started shoving furniture around, smashing things, making a mess, and intimidating the hell out of Stiles. A few pieces of broken boards and glass were hurled at him to make him dodge. There was a layer of water all over the floor and Stiles didn’t know where to find high ground in a loft.

He stood by the windows and tried to stay out of her way as Kali lay waste to everything in the loft, including the desk across the room where Stiles kept his stuff. He stared mutely as she dumped the desk and sent the box with his dad’s ashes in it flying into the mirrored wall. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that hurt, knew that was bad, but he couldn’t quite feel it. Whatever part of his brain wasn’t scared was numb, which was probably somewhat helpful. At least he wasn’t a crying mess in the corner of the room. He was too detached.

Gradually the empty, echoing loft became occupied, more of the group of red-eyed werewolves inviting themselves in, pacing and breaking things, like they were waiting for something. Stiles didn't really want to know what.

Then Derek showed up, with Isaac, and Boyd. Three of them, against three of the new, evil werewolves, didn't seem like terrible odds. Derek saw Stiles right away but didn't say anything to him, barely acknowledged him from across the big room as he instead assessed the threats in the room.

But then two more angry-faced werewolves showed up, seconds behind Derek, like they had been waiting to close the door on Derek’s arrival. The first one that caught Stiles' attention was a man walking in carefully, like he was blind. And the man who walked in with him, helped the blind one over the doorway, closed the door behind them, he caught Stiles' attention, too. He wore a hooded jacket that had seen better days, but the face under the hood was familiar.

Stiles bolted out into the water across the floor, confused, trying to get a better look at the new stranger's face. Derek moved to intercept and Stiles came up short.

"Dad?" he called out. Derek clamped a hand on Stiles' arm and pulled him back, turning to see who Stiles had been calling out to. They both saw Stiles' dad across the room when the man looked up at them. His eyes held the dangerous yellow glow of a werewolf following a pack.

Even Isaac fell back at the unexpected new wolf. The Sheriff of Beacon Hills had been declared dead months earlier, his remains scraped up from under the wall of a jail cell after a hunter had tossed in a homemade explosive where the sheriff had been pinned down. The whole city had shown up for the memorial. Everyone knew Stiles' dad's face, and everyone knew he was dead.

But Noah Stilinski stood across the room from Stiles, very much not dead. And very much a werewolf. Derek kept a vice-grip on Stiles' arm and wouldn't let him go over to see him. Stiles felt a panic attack breaking through the drugged numbness.

"What- what do I do?" he asked, his voice hardly working. Derek forced him around and behind himself, keeping hold of Stiles' wrist rather than trust him to stay back on his own. Stiles had a werewolf shield against other werewolves... but he wanted to go to his dad.

"Deucalion... you called us here. We’re here. What the hell is this..." Derek asked the blind man. Stiles' dad fell back behind the twin werewolves, like he wanted to hide in the shadows. He very clearly had a side, and it wasn't the one Stiles found himself on. Stiles pressed at Derek in a hint, trying to get his friend to make something make sense for him like he usually could, and Derek just kept hold of his wrist.

"We collected a beta, months ago," said the blind man. He stood near Kali, hands folded over the top of a cane. "He's still learning. Not having a lot of luck, really. But he came from a lucky line. From what we can tell, Scott McCall gifted the sheriff with the bite, when he tried to save his life. But, well, he didn't stick around to make sure he survived. Ennis did. Back before you killed him, of course."

At the mention of Ennis, Kali flashed fangs and flared her well-sharpened claws like an angry cat. She was a werewolf like the others, but she had a messed up sense of fashion, and not the best human hygiene practices in her quest to be scary. It certainly worked, but Stiles was drugged enough to judge her for it.

"I _don't care_ who Ennis is," Stiles announced, not so much bold as stupid and safe behind a werewolf shield. "I just want my dad back!"

Derek tugged on his wrist to make him stay behind him, even as Kali started toward them. Boyd and Isaac helpfully closed ranks, but the overall odds weren't looking good.

"That won't be happening," said Deucalion mildly. "The sheriff prefers to stay dead. The unfortunate consequences of a law enforcement officer killing a teenage girl on an uncontrollable full moon are much worse than the inconvenience of being legally dead."

Boyd seemed to forget himself for a moment. He broke away from the defensive line with Derek and Isaac and started toward Stiles' dad instead.

"That was _you_!" he bellowed. " _You_ killed Erica!"

"As a matter of fact, he did," Deucalion said. Derek let go of Stiles because the more pressing issue suddenly became keeping Boyd from going after the former sheriff. Stiles staggered backward, trying not to make himself too obvious a target as he tried to force himself to think through the drugged fog-brain.

A second later, Derek fell back to a defensive position as Boyd took on Kali. Stiles wasn't sure what to do other than stay out of the way. He just made sure to keep Derek between him and the bad guys. He couldn't fully process that his dad might actually be one of them, and every time he tried, his brain did a full reject and reboot, sending him a little further into his panic.

"Kali!" rumbled the blind werewolf suddenly, startling Stiles. "No!"

Stiles looked up to see Kali - small and wiry as she was by comparison to Boyd - standing over Boyd and poised to slice his neck. Boyd was down and he was hurt, in no position to defend himself. Derek stood feet away, locked out of the fight by the threat of one of the twins who mirrored his every move.

"That boy is not why we are here," Deucalion said. The woman flashed alpha-red eyes and glared up at Deucalion. She didn't let Boyd up, however, and stayed crouched over him. Awaiting a kill order.

"Then why are you here?" Derek asked, because apparently Derek was dumb and didn't know better than to feed the egos of evil psychopaths by giving them a chance to monologue and Stiles was a little too caught up trying to fend off panic from taking away his ability to breathe to pay attention to the evil plans of a werewolf just then, damnit.

There was a sudden shattering of glass that startled Stiles into ducking, knees soaking up water as he hit the floor. Derek stepped back toward him and half turned to defend him. Stiles looked up when Derek touched his shoulder.

"Gas!" Derek shouted at Boyd and Isaac, a distraction as all hell broke loose. Stiles saw the broken window then, the canister leaking smoke into the room. "Hunters!"

Kali let out an angry shriek as another window broke, more hunter arsenal breaking through Derek's loft. Bullets followed and Stiles ended up on his stomach in an inch of water as a flashbang went off across the room. People started shouting all around the room, but no one could see. Stiles' eyes stung.

"Up! Up!" Derek said in his ear as he pulled Stiles to his feet. Instead of heading for the door in the chaos, Derek cut across to the narrow, metal stairs. He shoved Stiles in front of him and made him run up the steps. There was a lot of random swearing as Stiles tried not to fall on his face, but they got up to the shallow false floor over the loft. It wasn't really good for much aside from storage, and Stiles wanted to know why Derek had just cornered them in a rat hole to die of toxic smoke inhalation, but Derek pointed him across to the exterior wall and the barely visible ladder there. The ladder meant rooftop access. Stiles caught on and followed at his heels. Once they made it to the roof, Derek slammed the door shut and broke the hinges to prevent anyone following them up.

"But my dad-" Stiles protested. Derek got between him and the hatch again, shoved toward the other side of the building.

"Your dad, and _Boyd_ , and _Isaac_... they can defend themselves. Right now, _you_ can't. We gonna argue about this and waste more time?" Derek replied. The building below them echoed from shouts and muffled gunfire. Stiles still felt like he needed to sit down, catch his breath. He needed to pass out and stop thinking entirely. Neither were an option just then. So he went with Derek.

*~*~*


	8. Chapter 8

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

Carson preferred that his patient stay where there was a ready supply of oxygen in case Sheppard forgot to breathe again, so the Lieutenant Colonel stayed where he was told. The infirmary had only a skeleton crew on deck because Sheppard was their only patient at the moment, so John had new people on hand to talk to at random. The other members of his team got to sleep in their own private guest quarters, and Sheppard played chess with a computer tablet most of the night.

It kept him from eavesdropping or intruding on the strangers’ conversations in the next room, kept his mind busy as the clock ticked away on the wall, and the sounds echoing in the underground facility warbled around in his brain. The doctors went quiet at random stretches of time, and John would catnap in between. He finally got what felt like real sleep around 5am.

By 7am, Carson was back. He offered to keep John company, and Sheppard learned in short order that his doctor wasn’t much of a chess player. It made sense, tactics weren’t really a job requirement, but John felt a little badly about kicking the guy’s ass at the game after their last few weeks. Sheppard still won. Every time.

The third game was put off on purpose because Sheppard heard Sam Carter’s voice in the hallway, and his name had definitely been mentioned. John was now used to accidentally eavesdropping on people’s conversations in tight quarters with echoing hallways, it made for entertaining gossip with Carson because the man was a snoop, but Sheppard wasn’t comfortable being the _subject_ of overheard conversation.

Sheppard stepped away from the table in the lab Carson had taken over for them and moved to poke his head out into the hall. Carter had just come around the far corner, keeping pace with Jack O’Neill. A moment later, they noticed him, too.

“Just the man we were looking for,” Jack said. He was probably still talking to Sam as they were still at the other end of the hall.

“Yeah, I know,” Sheppard said, his own voice pitched loud enough to be sure they heard him from that distance. It wasn’t the most polite intrusion, but he didn’t know how else to send the hint. Jack looked puzzled for a moment before the light bulb clicked on overhead.

“Right, got it,” the General said. “Fair to say nobody will sneak up on you any time soon.”

Sheppard nodded an affirmative and waited them out. He had nowhere else to be, anyway. Carson showed up at his shoulder then to investigate. A moment later, Carter and O’Neill were exchanging greetings with the doctor as he and Sheppard stepped aside to share the borrowed lab room.

“What’s with the digs,” said Jack, motioning to the room’s medical equipment and the general proximity to the infirmary. “You’re not still on quarantine, right?”

“No, sir. Doctors’ orders,” Sheppard said. Jack looked to the doctor in question, eyebrow raised in surprise. Carson shrugged, motioned toward Sheppard as though that explained it.

“Well, the last time he assured me he’d be fine, he dropped into a coma for some six hours or so. I’d rather not take his word on it again this close tae reassignment,” Carson said. Jack nodded his agreement and turned the frown on Sheppard.

“Don’t do that. Doc’s right. Coma bad,” he said.

“Yessir,” was all Sheppard could offer. O’Neill waved them toward their former chairs around the chess set as he pulled over wheeled stools for himself and Carter.

“So. I’m sure you’re all as shocked as I was to learn that Director Weir asked me to... step in, as it were, on this little project of yours,” said Jack. Nothing about his tone suggested any surprise. At all. Ever. And Sheppard actually felt a little better about the whole thing for it. Jack knew what it was like out in the field working for SGC, and the challenges they had at running Atlantis, far better than any bureaucrat or generic ladder climber within the military ranks, while also being a general. He was especially suited to push back at the Sentinel Project’s powergrab into the Stargate program.

“And I have spent the last three days in negotiations with the Director of the Sentinel Project. Lovely woman, let me assure you. That was fun,” Jack went on, again relying on his usual understated sarcasm. “The long and the short of it is that the Sentinel Project doesn’t have the necessary clearance to have the kind of access to the Atlantis Expedition that they want.”

That didn’t sound like good news to Sheppard. “Sir, I read some of their orders,” said John. “The whole project is just... one big power grab. Is there a way-”

Jack held up a hand to interrupt. “While I cannot personally argue against your theory, it is not in the division’s charter, so I must inform you that the Project is an important service for personnel throughout all branches. Including yourself. So no, there is no way around involving the Sentinel Project.”

“Understood,” said Sheppard.

“That being said...” cut in Carter. “Because of the potential problems associated with transferring you to the Sentinel Program, namely that they don’t have a system in place to protect the classified status of your work, you won’t be going to the Sentinel Project’s standard personnel tiers as originally planned.”

Sheppard sat back in his chair, arms crossed as he puzzled out the circular logic.

“Ah, excuse me for interruptin’ but... I still need to work with the Project’s medical team,” said Carson. He sounded equally confused. He pointed absently at Sheppard. “And he still needs to learn how to avoid putting himself in a coma every week.”

“Really? Every week?” asked Carter, surprised. Sheppard frowned, self-conscious about the zone-outs for a whole new reason now. Apparently he wasn’t hitting the expected average number of comas. Who even knew that was a thing?

“I’m... working on improving the ratios?” he replied half-heartedly.

As if summoned by the mere mention of a number, McKay showed up in the doorway then, a surprise mostly only because he had been very quiet on approach for once.

“What ratios? Since when do you do math?” he asked. The annoyance was almost welcome. Before Sheppard could tell him to go away, McKay had found another rolling chair to steal from a computer terminal and invited himself to the conversation. “If you need math, I’m your guy.”

“No, Rodney. I was asking about the zone outs,” Carter explained helpfully. “There’s no math.”

Rodney looked a little unhappy that he didn’t get to be the center of attention. Which was probably why Sheppard was okay with returning to it.

“So if I’m not part of the Sentinel Project-”

“Oh, no. You are. Technically. There’s just been a few... necessary changes in command structure above the division,” said Jack, quickly interrupting to make sure that John understood even less than he had before the conversation began. He waved it off. “All politics. Mostly.”

Sheppard stalled out for a moment, waiting for something to make sense.

“Okay...” he said, slowly dragging the word out as he struggled to follow what Carter and O’Neill were telling him. “So what does this mean for me then? As far as I know, I’m now 24 hours late for training. So should I be hauling ass to boot camp, or what?”

“It means - not to put too fine a point on it - that your ass is mine. Not theirs. And Carter is your SGC Liaison between your little Atlantean pocket of the Sentinel Project and myself. So you’ll report to her, she’ll report to me, and - as relevant - I’ll pass along to them. In exchange for them training you, and your team, and the good doctor here.”

Sheppard paused to consider the new chain of command. Even McKay and Carson were struck by the result of the General’s negotiations. They had all read the Sentinel Project’s User’s Manual, and they were all quite confident that what O’Neill had just outlined went against everything in it.

“Uh. And... they’re okay with this arrangement?” asked McKay. “Because... and maybe I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure I’m not... That pretty much leaves them with maybe 1% of what they’re used to getting in exchange for training a Sentinel team.”

“Basically,” Jack agreed. “They get to know John’s name, and vital stats, and copies of redacted medical records, as part of the program. But I’m bringing our Lieutenant Colonel on under Homeworld, so that is exactly all they will get.”

“What about the training?” asked Sheppard. Jack smiled, proud of himself for his negotiation prowess on behalf of Director Weir and her team. He held up a single index finger.

“One week here. Then, we’re assigning your training guide and captain to Atlantis with you for training there. Same classification, same command structure,” said Jack.

McKay looked about like his eyes might pop out of his head. Sheppard felt the surprise, but his eyes were behind sunglasses so he was safe. And he mostly felt relief. He was definitely going home.

“So Atlantis is back up and running in another month,” said McKay, looking to Sheppard and Carson like they had just collectively won the lotto.

“That’s the goal,” said Carter.

“Depends on our boy here passing the training team’s assessment,” added Jack, a pointed look cast at Sheppard. “Which means no more comas, or whatever. Zero. Aim for that ratio.”

“Yessir,” said Sheppard before McKay could try to correct the General’s math.

“And, maybe I’m not a doctor, but... I think you need to get out of quarantine,” Jack went on. The gloating tone faded to something more sober and General-like. “The training team will be here at some point in the next, oh, twelve hours or so, is my guess. And you’ll need to be ready to work, do your thing. Hit the gym. Take a nap. Something. But get the hell out of _here_.”

Carson looked very worried by the order. “That’s not a good way to keep him off oxygen thus far, General.”

“Then when the training team gets here, if he’s on oxygen, they’ll know what they’ve got to work with,” replied Jack. “And that’s probably the most important part of the next twenty four hours, is getting everyone caught up and... working on the _same_ team... right?”

The logic wasn’t exactly flawed and Carson couldn’t argue with it. Sheppard scratched distractedly at the plastic wrap covering the fresh tattoo on the back of his hand. That was a whole new outlook on it for him, too. Not sitting at the table kicking the doc’s ass at chess for the rest of the day seemed like a great idea. But so did avoiding zone-outs at all possible costs. He wanted to hit the ground running, not face-first in an oxygen mask.

Carter stood up, drawing Sheppard’s attention back up from the tabletop. General O’Neill was already standing, too, and Sheppard had a brief moment of panic wondering if he had zoned out. But then again, if he had, he’d gotten away with it. Maybe the zone out thing could be beat.

He heard Carter ask graciously for McKay’s help again today, while the team was still there. McKay was all too happy to save the science-day at SGC and didn’t have to be invited twice. That meant there would be absolutely no kicking Rodney’s ass at chess to keep himself out of trouble.

When the others left, Carson waited to see what John wanted to do about the orders of no more zone outs.

“I’ve got cards in my bag, the mess’ll have toothpicks,” Carson offered. “We could... I dunno. Try poker?”

Sheppard cracked a smile at the genuine effort.

“Thanks, Carson. I’ll go get some breakfast. Then, depending on how that goes, I’ll let you know. Or someone will,” said Sheppard. “Assuming I don’t end up drowning in my wheaties.”

“You will _not_ ,” Carson replied, somewhere between a reassurance and an unspoken threat that the good doctor would personally murder him if he tried to drown in a bowl of cereal. And the doctor let Sheppard leave on his own to try to find his way to the mess hall.

It was actually a little bit amusing when Sheppard’s uniformed shadow stepped out into the hallway after him and fell into pace beside him.

“They could just give me a radio you know,” John informed the kid. The Sgt. smiled and shrugged it off.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“I think I know where they put the mess hall,” said Sheppard. “Don’t tell me. I want to try something.”

“Yessir, Colonel.”

John decided then that the kid could stick around. He wanted the ego boost that came with someone reminding him that he was a goddamned ranking officer in the Air Force. If there was anything that he could focus on to fend off a zone out, it was that.

*~*~*

There was something reassuring and peaceful about math. Man could cross two galaxies and find that the rules and laws of numbers in their orderly systems would hold up in both places. At the same time. Like a bridge. It was really very comforting. Even after spending hours arguing with a full team - _some_ of whom were actually competent - about the intersections of science and math and their jobs, Rodney McKay felt comforted. He went back to his quarters ready to sleep. Apparently galaxial jet lag was a thing, and the normal Earth gravity was definitely not what he was used to anymore.

The first sign that there was something slightly amis was the uniformed Sergeant sleeping in the chair across the hall from Rodney’s door. It was a military base, uniforms were the expected norm, but napping... that was a new one. Choosing to ignore the lapse, Rodney let himself into his guest rooms.

It was dark, unexpectedly, and McKay felt very confused. He always left the light on in new places, rather than risk injury in the dark to his toes and knees. They were thirty floors below ground, so it wasn’t like he had planned to come back to daylight shining through the windows. Rodney fumbled for the switch on the wall as he dropped his pack on the floor.

The answers, of course, presented with the illumination of the room.

Colonel Sheppard was stretched out on McKay’s bed, boots on his blanket, and his head buried under the pillow. And McKay’s hearing wasn’t perfect, but it sounded from across the room like Sheppard was very much asleep, just short of snoring with a pillow over his face.

Well. That wasn’t fair.

“John?” McKay dropped into the desk chair rather than the bed he had been looking forward to for the past hour. John continued to not-snore into McKay’s pillow.

“John... Colonel Sheppard... Earth to Sheppard!” McKay tried changing volume as he went, trying to at least mostly-politely get through from the safe distance of five feet away.

John woke up, startled, and tossed the pillow at the wall. He blinked and then squinted around the room as he pushed himself up off his stomach.

“Rodney?” he asked, sounding just as confused as McKay was.

“Have a nice nap?” McKay asked. He moved the wheeled chair over to retrieve the pillow from the floor and put it back up on the bed by hitting Sheppard with it.

“Maybe,” said John, barely ducking the pillow. “Why are you in here?”

“Because I was told this was my room,” said Rodney. “That’s why my stuff is in here.”

He pointed out the PJs hanging over the open bathroom door across the room from them. Sheppard sat up quickly then, boots on the floor where they belonged as he tried to straighten the rumpled bed covers without yet standing.

“I’m - wow. I guess I got the rooms mixed up. I thought I was in mine,” said Sheppard.

“Obviously,” replied McKay.

“They all look the same...” Sheppard still tried to defend himself but McKay just stared at him. He pointed, again, at the signs of temporary ownership that had already taken over the room the night before. Sheppard waved it off. “Okay, I got it. I have a terrible sense of direction under ground. I can’t find anything. Except the mess hall. I did find _that_! I just got a little bit lost heading back...”

“It’s fine. But can I at least have my bed back? Before you put your boots on it again,” said McKay. Yes, he was whining. Sheppard started to comply but then stopped.

“Just for the record, there’s nothing on my shoes. I haven’t been anywhere with mud in over a month,” said Sheppard. He lifted a booted foot to his knee so he could more accurately prove his point. “I _miss_ mud. There is no mud.”

“Mud isn’t the only thing that gets on boots,” replied McKay, still offended. “And! I have to sleep there, not you. Get your... dandruff off my bed.”

Sheppard rolled his eyes and stood up, offering the bed back with an elaborate bow. McKay moved to tuck the blankets back in and smooth the covers, and Sheppard stole the rolling chair. He slouched in good and made himself comfy as McKay glared at the ceiling.

“So how did today’s _Science with McKay_ time go for the Earthlings?” Sheppard asked, still tired but also apparently bored. “I’m guessing the planet won’t be going supernova any time soon.”

McKay nodded his agreement as he sat himself down on his bed, frowning slightly. “I helped Carter with an equation she was translating wrong. She’s working on a bridge idea. My idea. Old one.”

“That sounds boring. You never do boring without a deadline. Like, the dead-deadline,” said Sheppard. He sounded unhappy about it. He frowned suddenly. “It’s been over a month since we were even shot at. How have you gotten _anything_ done?”

“Believe it or not, my ideas are better when I’m _not_ being shot at,” Rodney complained in return. But the point stuck in his head. Sheppard shrugged it off.

“It just feels weird,” he admitted.

“So go shoot something,” Rodney suggested. “It’s a military base. There’s a shooting range somewhere.”

“I’d bet a week’s wages Carson won’t let me have my weapons back until after training,” said Sheppard. He tapped at his elfy, pointed ear. “These are still a little too sensitive.”

“Well, what are you going to do when we get back out in the field and people start shooting at us again?” McKay asked. “Hide behind me or something for the extra sound barrier?”

Sheppard held his hands up, just as clueless as Rodney on how the future would work out for the team. A pensive quiet fell between them, and it didn’t bother McKay that his friend hadn’t left yet. John was right. It had been a very weird month, and after the conversation with Jack O'Neill that morning, maybe an end was in sight. John especially was probably left with a lot to process. McKay could at least work through it all; even when his shoulder hurt like hell, he could pop a pill and dive into math and science and star systems.

But Sheppard was just an adrenaline junkie working through withdrawals and isolation, in addition to the whole ‘hearing heartbeats’ thing that the Sentinel Project’s manual said he had going on now. That couldn’t even be a real thing.

It got stuck in McKay’s head.

“Can you really hear people’s heartbeats?” he asked. Sheppard lifted a shoulder in a lazy shrug.

“I guess? I mean, I hear something that sounds like that a lot, I’ve just... never bothered to track the sound down to the source. Usually try to block it out. It’s... creepy,” replied the man who had regular interactions with alien beings.

McKay stared, jaw slack.

“Wait. So me, right now. You can hear me, my heartbeat?”

Sheppard shrugged again. “Yeah. And you had chili for lunch. Can smell the stuff you spilled on your jacket.” He frowned at the door suddenly. “What time is it? I think I’m hungry.”

“There’s an extra power bar in the bag on the table,” McKay offered. Sheppard immediately turned to look for it. The companionable quiet took over again as McKay tried to mentally figure out the decibel range of Sheppard’s enhanced hearing, and Sheppard chowed down on a protein bar.

“Chess?” suggested Sheppard after the food was gone. Rodney agreed and started to look for the board he had brought along for the trip.

They got set up and had made two moves each before Sheppard stopped and frowned at the door.

"What?" McKay asked, not looking up. Sheppard wasn’t exactly above the dirty tricks of a ten year old at a chess board.

“I think we’re going to have to put this game on hold,” Sheppard said. A moment later he stood and started looking around for his jacket. McKay frowned, motioned to the game in front of him.

“We literally just started this one,” he complained. “You can’t be quitting already.”

“I’m not quitting, Rodney,” replied Sheppard. He shrugged into his jacket. He pointed toward the door. The sgt. outside the room knocked on the door as if to prove it. “I’ve got to go.”

“Now you’re just showing off,” muttered McKay. Sheppard rolled his eyes. He opened the door to the uniformed guard sent to babysit him.

“Sir, Colonel Carter -”

“Wants to see me in the conference room, yeah, I heard, thank you,” Sheppard said, a pointed look aimed at McKay. McKay dismissed it with a wave.

“Whatever. This counts as a forfeit though,” McKay replied. He pointed to the board in front of him. “I’m still here, I’m still ready to play. You quit, you lose.”

Sheppard stopped in the door to glare at him for the immature tactic. He actually seemed to have to think about it, came back into the room to stare down at the chess pieces on the board. They had only moved twice. There was no possible way he could check in a single move.

Rodney crossed his arms and grinned smugly up at him. It wasn’t cheating. It was in their agreed-upon House Rules, one that had been a valid win for two years.

“Uh uh,” said Sheppard. He grabbed McKay by the arm and hauled him up off his perch on the edge of the bed. “You’re coming, too.”

“What? _I_ wasn’t called in-”

“You are now. She called me in to meet the new team. Might as well start now,” said Sheppard. Rodney only grudgingly allowed himself to be pulled away from the chess set and the bed he had so been looking forward to an hour earlier.

*~*~*

John wasn’t sure what he had expected to find in the meeting with the new Sentinel team, but it wasn’t an aging Army Ranger and a reforming hippie. The two men who had been assigned by the Sentinel Project were probably nice guys, to have some beer with, maybe play some golf, but if Sheppard was a betting man - which he was, just maybe less of a cash-flush betting guy than he wanted to be - he would not put five bucks on this expert Sentinel team against a Wraith.

He went along with the introductions anyway, glad he had dragged McKay along after all. He needed to get a better read on the pair, and Rodney was great at demanding other people’s attention while Sheppard ignored him.

“I’m sorry, but did you say you’re a doctor?” McKay asked the curly haired hippie named Sandburg. The man may have been in a uniform, but it was too big for him, had patches on it that were in no way regulation, he was wearing some sort of jade necklace, and pulled back or not, his hair was longer than Elizabeth’s. Blair Sandburg didn’t match up as any kind of military, let alone an Army captain like the bar patches on his jacket would indicate.

He was a high contrast to his partner, Jim Ellison, who kept his graying hair cropped close and looked like he had ironed his uniform after getting off the plane. Sheppard sat across the table, watching as Sandburg nodded and dug around in a backpack.

“Yeah, but not the medical kind of doctor,” Sandburg told McKay. Sheppard very clearly heard McKay mutter a relieved “Oh thank god,” under his breath and had to choke back a laugh. Sitting next to Sandburg, across from Sheppard, it was hard not to notice Ellison crack a grin.

“He gets that a lot,” Ellison said to Sheppard. His partner glanced up only briefly from his search in the backpack.

“Gets what?” asked Sandburg.

“Nothing,” replied Ellison and McKay both at once. John found his opinion softening on the team just slightly.

“Blair is an anthropologist, Rodney. Like Daniel Jackson,” said Sam Carter. She sat next to the Sentinel team, while General O’Neill sat beside Sheppard, probably to keep him on-script. The General had a lot riding on the two men on the other side of the table joining AR-1, too, after his days of negotiations.

“Anthropologists are great and all, but the cultural stuff... that’s what we’ve got Teyla and Ronon for,” McKay pointed out, a little defensive of his teammates’ territory.

“No, Dr. McKay - I’m not here as an anthropologist. That’s just my doctorate. Well, one of them. I’m here as a Guide,” said Sandburg. He seemed to be getting Rodney figured out alright. Blair set a hand to Jim’s arm as a visual anchor point to his words. “I’m his Guide. Where I go, he goes, so where we need Jim to go, I go. Package deal, kinda thing.”

McKay looked to Ellison then. “So you’re the one who can hear heartbeats?”

Ellison seemed to be judging the question but nodded an affirmative. Sheppard nudged McKay’s elbow and pointed his attention to where Ellison’s right hand rested on the table top.

“Tattoo. That makes him the Sentinel. We learned that one yesterday, remember,” he said helpful but no less taunting his friend for it. His own hands clasped in his lap, Sheppard scratched at the plastic over the back of his hand.

“Right,” McKay replied. He scrunched his face in what passed for an apology from him. “Still figuring this stuff out. The manual didn’t have much to go by.”

“I hear that,” said Sandburg, in a tone that sounded quite bitter to Sheppard’s ears. Blair slid a good old fashioned book across the table at Rodney. “This is a bit heavy on the science maybe, but it is a hundred times more useful than the manual. It will give you a better understanding of what they can do. How to help make the senses stuff... well, make sense.”

Sheppard sat up and took notice then.

“I like science,” McKay said. He opened the book even as Sheppard reached over and pulled the book from his friend’s science-greedy hands.

“That’s mine,” Sheppard informed McKay. He glanced up at Sandburg between flipping past the cover pages. “I’ve been needing one of these for the last month. Is it digital, or a shareable file or anything?”

“Sure, but the book format tends to be more portable,” said Sandburg.

“Not where we’re from,” replied Sheppard. He was already distracted, reading bits and pieces of the few hundred-page paperback in front of him. He looked from the book to the Sentinel team and then to O’Neill before his attention went back to the hippie at the table.

“Wait a minute. You wrote this? All of this?” he asked.

“Yeah. The Project adopted my initial research. I’ve been working with them to expand on it for the last ten years, so it’s gotten to be pretty comprehensive,” said Blair. “I mean, everyone is an individual, it’s always slightly different, but we’ve got the pretty universal stuff nailed down after fifteen-odd years of practice.”

Sheppard pulled the book a little closer to himself, protective of the treasure trove of coveted information. “Can I have this?”

Sandburg nodded. McKay was still trying to read the book over John’s shoulder. He raised a hand slightly to get Sandburg’s attention back.

“Uh... Two questions,” he began. “First, if this is all yours... how far have you gotten with the genetics involved with this Sentinel thing? And second, does that go into the gene at all?” McKay pointed at the book under Sheppard’s bandaged hand when the man shut him out of snooping. Before Sandburg could even answer one part, McKay was talking again. “Follow up - Can I have a copy of that?”

“And Carson,” added Sheppard. “He’ll want to read it.”

“Especially if it tells him how to stop the comas,” said McKay. He looked up at Sandburg again. “That’s in here, right?”

“What comas?” asked Sandburg, tuning into something he was much more concerned about than Rodney’s earlier questions. He seemed to be keeping up otherwise, which Sheppard took as a good sign overall for the team.

“The zone outs,” offered Carter. “The Lt. Colonel has ended up in the infirmary for the zone outs once or twice a week for the last month.”

“A month? What took so long to get us involved?” asked Sandburg, genuine enough in his surprise that Sheppard didn’t take offense to his implied support of the Project’s compliance rules.

“We’re not based local,” he replied. “It takes us a minute to get back here.”

“Yeah, just a _minute_ ,” said Blair. Wheels were obviously turning in his head, but he left it alone. He looked over at Ellison, a wordless baton pass to the resident expert on the topic. The Sentinel looked to Sheppard.

“Carson’s the doctor, right?” he asked. At Sheppard’s confirming nod, Ellison didn’t seem surprised. “We met him earlier. And I told him the same thing I’ll tell you. So listen up - It’s not on him to keep you breathing in a zone. That’s on you. You stick an oxygen mask on your face in a zone, it just means you can chase the senses farther out instead of worry about keeping yourself alive. The very worst thing you can do to yourself is train your senses into ignoring the most basic requirements of the body they are there to support. When your senses hijack your brain, you don’t hand them the keys and let them drive like that.”

Sheppard considered the very firm advice from someone who had obviously been there before. “Well... when you put it that way, it makes sense,” he said. He _had_ gotten a little reliant on somebody else saving his ass. Maybe.

“It does,” agreed Sandburg. “Think about it this way. If someone loses their sight or their hearing, it doesn’t shut down their other vital organs of the body. The body, in one way or another, steps up everything else in order to make up for the loss. That’s how it’s _supposed_ to work.”

“And by intervening with life support, Dr. Beckett has been accidentally suppressing that instinct,” realized Carter. She looked from Blair to Sheppard and back. “You said you told him this? He’s been looking for help for so long, but we didn’t have much to send him...”

“We told him,” said Sandburg. “I mean, I don’t know him, but he seemed fine with it. But that’s why, you know, a month out is kind of a record, really. We gotta keep a lot of this stuff close to the vest. It’s not a great idea to publicize how to completely disable a Sentinel, and the kind of medical info Dr. Beckett needs to know could be easily reverse engineered to do that.”

Again, a kernal of perspective shift made another puzzle piece fit into place for Sheppard. He got quickly hung up on Sandburg’s words, however.

“Disable-what now?” he asked.

Jim caught his attention. “Colonel, take your sunglasses off.”

Sheppard made no move to comply. “I’m not a fan of the fluorescents in here...”

Ellison gave a short nod. “I get it. But humor me.”

Jack O’Neill helpfully kicked Sheppard’s ankle in a not-so-subtle order to comply. The sunglasses grudgingly came off. Sheppard tried not to squint as he adjusted. Ellison probably noticed anyway, as he raised a hand to wave at the lights.

“If you’re this dialed up under fluorescent lights, what do you think a flashbang will do to you out in the field?” Ellison asked. Sheppard winced involuntarily at the mere thought.

“Nothing good,” he said unhappily. Ellison nodded his agreement with that assessment.

“Or even a laser pointer? Anybody in here got a laser pointer? We could find out what the reflections can do.”

Sheppard felt a repeated twinge of pain at the corner of his eye from the lights overhead and it was steadily bothering him more and more. He didn’t know exactly what was causing it, but he knew it hadn’t been happening when he had the sunglasses on his face. Rather than ask permission and be told _no_ , he lowered his glasses back down over his eyes.

Instantly he noticed the reflection of a bright white flare of light flickering in his peripheral vision. He followed it to the source. Ellison had turned the bezel of his watch to the inside of his wrist where it rested on the table. The glass face caught the light from the lights overhead with even the slightest movement and glared right at Sheppard’s eyes. The man had done it on purpose. He certainly had Sheppard’s attention now, and he knew it.

“You can be blinded easier than anyone else at this table,” Ellison said. “Your vision is too sensitive. A pair of binoculars, or a rifle scope out in the brush, just has to catch the light the right way and you’re down for who knows how long. In the hands of someone who knows what the hell they’re doing, Colonel, that’s a teamkiller in the field. The idea is to limit the number of people who know how to do that.”

Sheppard sunk a little in his chair, unconsciously hanging on to territory as he realized the truth in the man’s words.

“And as a side note, I’ve gotta point out that it is entirely counter productive to zone out on the reflection of the bad guy’s rifle scope. So that’s something you are going to have to work on. I almost took you down in under ten seconds here. That’s a lifetime in the field,” Ellison continued.

Sheppard took the point, but he stayed hidden behind his sunglasses. He could feel McKay staring at him and it wasn’t helping.

“Wait. What just happened?” McKay asked.

“Nothing,” replied Sheppard and Ellison. It wasn’t likely to hold Rodney off for long, but Ellison at least seemed to intimidate him enough to let it pass for now. The Sentinel may have been in his early fifties, easily, but he was only an inch or two shorter than Ronon and even without the Army Ranger uniform could flatten McKay in any kind of spar.

Sheppard was definitely rethinking his initial impressions of the Sentinel team O’Neill had stolen from the Sentinel Project for Atlantis. The two men who had quite literally written the book on the whole Sentinel thing. Maybe they could catch on better than Sheppard could as he tried to figure his own mess out. He looked to O’Neill, motioned toward the men across the table.

“Did they pass clearance?” he asked. Jack nodded.

“They will.”

“So they’re on my team when I get back home?”

“That’s the idea.”

Sheppard looked back to Sandburg and Ellison. “Assuming you take the assignment -”

Sandburg interrupted quickly. “My understanding is that we’ve been reassigned. There’s no _if_ on our end,” he said. He glanced at Ellison and then back to Sheppard with a shrug. “I’m still under contract, so. We go.”

Sheppard narrowed his eyes in confusion at the aloof view on dropping life as they knew it and relocating to another galaxy entirely. But maybe Sandburg and Ellison hadn’t been read in yet. “Contract?” he asked instead.

“Yeah. A little different than your average enlistment. But I get to use his rank and access still,” said Sandburg, motioning vaguely to the captain at his shoulder. “It’s the same in the ways that count. Military owns my soul until they say otherwise. So we go. And until further notice, I’ve been told that means we go with you. Get you and your team back to work.”

Something was off about the response and Sheppard looked to O’Neill. The General dismissed it with a nod.

“Remember I said there were some politics involved? Part of it was the contract. I’m handling it,” O’Neill said. He looked to their guests and new teammates. “I think in a way that is more mutually beneficial for everyone.”

Sheppard looked uncertainly between them again. There was a whole untold story under there that he wasn’t sure yet who he had to grill for it. Sandburg went back to his formerly chill and cheerful self and rolled a hand to wave Sheppard on.

“So. Go ahead and assume we take the assignment,” he prompted.

“Yeah,” said Sheppard. Moving on. “Then, factoring in the bit about us screwing me up from the start... how long do you figure before I can get back in the field with my team? And not get zoned by a rifle scope.”

“Oh, man. There’s too many factors there,” said Sandburg. “And there’s the whole thing with a Guide. Really, it could be months before you’re stable.”

“Realistically, yes,” agreed Ellison. “But it’s on you. Could be weeks.”

Sheppard wasn’t exactly comforted by the replies.

“Okay... how important is this Guide thing, really?” he asked Ellison directly. “Because I’m not even interested in going out looking for somebody here like some kind of dating game. I just want to get back to doing my job.”

“Important,” said Ellison without even taking a few seconds to think about it. “You get a baseline, you follow that baseline, where you are. It keeps everything else in a controllable range. As long as you know their normal, you’ve got something to tune in on when everything else gets too... loud.”

“Why can’t I just... use me as the baseline?” asked Sheppard. That’s what normal people did, like he used to before some damn prison planet got involved.

“Because you’re the one in sunglasses, in a conference room, underground,” said Ellison. “Your senses have _no_ baseline.”

Sheppard scowled at the table top, drummed his hands over it.

“What about my team? I can get used to them. They’re consistent,” he said, looking for ideas. He shrugged and rolled a hand toward McKay. “Well, he’s not. Panics at bugs. But the other two are solid.”

“Excuse me. I’ve seen some pretty... _life-altering_ bugs. I’m allowed to be... less than enthusiastic about _bugs_ ,” replied McKay. Sheppard nodded, rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses.

“I didn’t say that you weren’t. I said Ronon and Teyla are a lot more steady. Which is true, and you know it,” said Sheppard. McKay still looked offended, but he didn’t argue.

Across the table, Sandburg and Ellison exchanged a look that probably meant something in their private little Sentinel team way.

“We can work with you and the team, try to narrow down the Guide thing,” Sandburg said. “It’s just... easier with that one person, you know? You might be better off-”

“Look, I’ve been married and done the whole pairing off and it’s not my scene at work. I work with my team. I’m good there, I just... want to get back there. Not leave them all hanging like this,” said Sheppard.

“I’m kinda also getting the vibe you don’t do rule books,” said Sandburg. Sheppard actually smiled at that.

“Not in the job description,” he said, smug.

“Well, it _is_ ,” added O’Neill. “It’s just... down there on the list.”

“Entire light years,” said Sheppard.

“Indeed, _Lieutenant_ Colonel,” O’Neill replied, just to dig at the rank.

Sandburg followed the back and forth with infinitely more patience than Rodney did. He seemed to think it over and crossed his arms as he leaned back in the chair.

“Right. So. We can work with the team. I’ll get with Jim on this tonight, see what we can do without a rule book,” said Blair. He didn’t seem bothered by the prospect of working without the manual for a while. “If nothing else, we’ll have a better idea by the end of tomorrow.”

“What’s _tomorrow_?” asked McKay. His tone suggested he was hoping for another Science Day with Carter’s team.

“Assessment,” said Ellison. He nodded toward Sheppard. “Put him through the crash course so we know what there is to work with.”

Sheppard looked from Ellison to the few hundred pages of homework he still had to do. He only just got the how-to manual and there was going to be a test already?

“That’s tomorrow?” he clarified.

“Yep. And you’re gonna need sleep,” said Blair.

“No reading up all night,” added Ellison. “It won’t do you any good without a baseline. Sleep will help more, and we can work on catching you up as we go in the morning.”

O’Neill pulled the book out from under Sheppard’s hand and slid it along the table to Sam. “Why don’t you keep tabs on that? Maybe get with Beckett to start going over it while the Lt. Colonel is busy tomorrow,” the General suggested in a tone that made it much more like an order than an idle idea.

Sheppard watched silently as the book disappeared under the table in the Colonel’s hands. He definitely couldn’t fight Sam for it.

Well. That could have gone better.

*~*~*


	9. Chapter 9

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

The whole team was ordered to breakfast at 7am. Even Carter showed up. Teyla and Ronon met with the new guys - John still had a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that he had two new crew and teammates - and seemed to be okay with them.

Ronon looked at Ellison like a cat with a new plaything. Ellison and Sheppard stood shoulder to shoulder, but he was a brawny, sturdier build, like Ronon, and apparently that made him some kind of challenge. Dex wanted to spar, to test the big man in a fight, and Sheppard had to gently remind him that there was no fighting among their own team. At least, no real fights, and they could spar later. Much later.

“How do we know they’ll be able to handle the team if we don’t know they can fight?” Ronon pressed, not caring at all that Ellison and Sandburg were right there at the table with them.

“It’s one of those things we have the luxury to find out before we need to,” reasoned Teyla. John nodded and pointed toward the idea in support of it.

“And Ellison’s an Army Ranger, Ronon. I promise you, he is fully qualified to fight,” said Sheppard, paused over his plate of scrambled eggs and hashbrowns to deal with Ronon’s poking at bears. “I’m just saying, he doesn’t need to fight you, and not _right now_.”

To his credit, Ellison took it in stride, even seemed amused by the direct challenge. Sandburg looked concerned for their safety, however, which Sheppard figured wasn’t good for him personally or for the team generally.

“I’m just saying...”

“No fighting, Ronon. That’s an order,” said Sheppard. Ronon sighed with his quiet sense of the dramatic and agreed.

“Where are you from?” Sandburg hesitated to engage with Ronon but the question was obviously burning at him. Sheppard glanced down the table at Carter before looking at the watch he wasn’t wearing.

“They’re not local,” he said before Teyla could more honestly answer. “And I think somebody said we’ve got a plane to catch. So... let’s finish up and get going.”

It wasn’t his kindest moment as a team lead, but until Sandburg and Ellison were better read-in, officially, Sheppard wasn’t sure what the story was supposed to be. He could talk to Carter about it on the plane, as their new and shiny SGC Liaison, and handle things better on the other side. But things were fully capable of getting out of hand if Sandburg started up a conversation about alien planets and civilizations without realizing it. Once McKay finished waking up over his oatmeal and “real” coffee, there would be no peace for the rest of the day, and Sheppard was honestly just looking to stall the inevitable.

Sheppard noticed that Sandburg did that thing where he looked to Ellison like he was confirming the orders before accepting it. It was the noticeable tick of a team within a team, and a trap Sheppard really didn’t want to fall into himself with the whole Guide thing. He didn’t like cliques, and the Sentinel team was one by default; it had to be, according to how Sentinel senses apparently worked. He wasn’t sure how to navigate that without hurting his team in one way or another. The last thing he wanted was to see his tiny team split up by invisible walls, especially the kind he had to build himself.

Sheppard would have preferred to take the Jumper, but for various reasons relating to clearance and secrecy, it wasn’t possible. So they caught a C-21A and had to listen to McKay explain the “rudimentary” functionality of the Learjet to Teyla and Ronon for the next two and a half hours.

“I’m guessing they don’t fly much?” Blair asked Sheppard at one point as McKay tried to scribble out designs about the plane’s operation for Teyla while they were still somewhere around 35,000 feet in the air.

“Oh... they do...” said Sheppard, still uncertain on how to blend his team’s knowledge and clearance with Sandburg and Ellison’s experience of the world. Strange as it was, he had never found himself in the awkward position of having to explain to people from Earth that Atlantis was real and had been built by aliens without having something more tangible at hand to prove it. He wasn’t sure how to keep stalling on the issue, but Sheppard was more or less determined to. So he relied on good old fashioned political bullshit.

“We’re just... used to dealing with more advanced experimental craft. And Teyla and Ronon aren’t exactly up on the science stuff like McKay is. And once you get McKay going on anything math or science, you might as well clear your schedule,” said Sheppard. Teyla glanced over at him for it, the small grin on her face proof enough that she caught him bullshitting their new recruits. McKay didn’t look up at him, just scribbled some more on his paper.

“You know, this plane isn’t that big. I can hear you just fine,” Rodney announced from the other aisle. Sheppard considered that a win as it switched McKay onto talking about the difference between propulsion in Earth’s atmosphere versus space, and how nobody ever wanted to find out how a C-21 fared under water.

Once all the shouting was done and the plane back on the ground, Ronon liked the rough ride and the noise compared to the Jumpers he had gotten used to. Teyla informed Sheppard that she could better appreciate his love for flying faster than 200mph for the experience, but she certainly seemed happier once they landed at their destination.

“Now what?” Sheppard asked Sandburg as Carter dealt with the preparations with the local base. He had stepped foot on Beale AFB’s tarmac once or twice in his career, but Carter was the full bird Colonel who had set up the day’s excursions. He didn’t want to be involved if he didn’t have to be. Too many awkward questions, and his ears hurt like a sunovabitch after the plane ride. He had a headache but he didn’t want to admit it because Ellison seemed fine.

Sheppard was a pilot, damnit. He refused to be at all physically compromised by a simple plane ride.

“Now we run you out in the field and see what you can do,” said Blair, quite happy to make the report. “You’ll be with Jim for this round. Everybody else will split up.”

“Everybody else?” asked McKay. He was being overly loud, in Sheppard’s opinion, and John cringed. “Why everybody else?”

“It’s a sensory test, trying to get his range narrowed down,” said Sandburg.

“Yes, but the _whole team_ has to be tested for this?” pressed McKay. He caught at Carson’s arm and presented him as evidence of his concerns. “Everyone? Is this thing going viral or something?”

“No... it’s pretty standard, really. We’re looking for the baseline, and without the Guide, that’s a pretty wide open territory. So we do it this way. No pass or fail, just teams of two, out in the woods, and we see how he does trying to track you all down,” said Blair.

Sheppard wasn’t really a fan of that. He wanted to ask if he could catch a nap or something first, at least go get another cup of coffee. When Carter started walking back toward him, he saw a human lifeline and pounced on the one opportunity he could see to get himself out of what was certain to be a mess.

“Are we cleared for this?” he asked her. He motioned toward Teyla and Ronon. “They have not been briefed for being out here...”

“I briefed them,” said Carter with a smile. Sheppard blinked, straightened up a little.

“Them? What about _me_? Who briefed _me_?”

“Me,” said Blair, helpfully. “Just now.”

Sheppard looked back to Carter, letting his irritation show as she just grinned at him.

“We got this, Lt. Colonel. _You’ve_ got this. It’s just another mission. You wanted to get back in the field with your team, and we set it up,” Carter said.

“Yeah, but we normally end up _shooting things_ on missions, and I don’t think we want that to happen _here_ ,” said Sheppard, forcing a smile through a very tense jaw. Carter took his point and nodded.

“Sure, but Ronon knows not to shoot anything. Teyla’s fully range qualified in her sidearm-”

“Why are we shooting things in California?” blurted McKay. He started searching to double check that he wasn’t wearing his uniform. “I... I am not dressed for a mission. Nobody said anything about a mission. My uniform’s in my _stuff_ , my stuff is in _Colorado_...”

“There’s not going to be any shooting of any things,” said Carter. She took a deep breath and tried to calm them down, and Sheppard smugly guessed she was reconsidering her decision not to brief them before dragging them to another base in another part of the country. It was a bad call and he was sure as hell going to get on her case about it later, when Rodney wasn’t standing next to them and panicking about a mission.

“Look, it’s literally just a game of hide and seek,” said Ellison. The man had been quiet for most of the morning but he seemed to have a low tolerance for bullshit. Sheppard was suddenly reminded of the things the trash-manual had said about Sentinel being human lie detectors and was mildly regretting his pisspoor efforts at diplomacy so far. Ellison carried on, content to ignore him. “I’ll be with Sheppard and we’ll find the rest of you. The only thing you have to do is sit where you’re put, not get lost, and stay within range of radio contact with Colonel Carter.”

McKay calmed down at that. “Okay, so I can take a nap when I get there? I didn’t bring much to do. And I think my tablet needs charged.”

Carter chuckled to herself and patted him warmly on the shoulder, which seemed to make McKay’s morning at least. “Our ride’s over there,” she said, pointing toward a Black Hawk chopper across the tarmac that had a team working through pre-flight prep. “Let’s go.”

Sheppard stood and stared at the big helicopter, honestly not sure he could handle the ride after the way the plane out had hit his senses. His ears were ringing, everyone was talking normally - with the exception of McKay - and he felt like they were yelling, and his balance felt badly off. And that wasn’t even counting the headache.

“Hey... You okay, man?” Sandburg asked. He stood quietly at Sheppard’s shoulder as the others moved toward the chopper. Even Ellison followed after Carter, at the back of the group like he was herding them away. Sheppard frowned at the relief he felt by the implied permission he had been granted to just stand there in the shade of the hangar and get his bearings.

“Yeah, sure. I... don’t know, honestly,” he admitted, reluctantly not lying like he wanted to. Sandburg shifted to dig into his ever-present backpack. A moment later he handed over a small bag with ear plugs.

“You’re gonna need these. Use them. And grab a helmet, if they’ve got one,” said Sandburg. He kept his voice quiet, but Sheppard could hear him easily over the wind rattling the hangar and the sound of some of the plane engines inside still cooling down.

Sheppard had spent most of the last twenty years bouncing between field missions and air force bases, he knew the sounds that surrounded him now and used to be so familiar with them that he found them comforting. Now he missed the ocean. The mechanical grinding of the planes and choppers grated his senses all the way to his bones. It was a different kind of surreal.

“Give yourself a break, man,” Blair went on, blindly coaching someone he had just met and yet, Sheppard realized, hitting the mark. “You haven’t had to deal with this stuff in a while. You’ve been stuck indoors on a ship for a _month_. A ship has controlled environments. When’s the last time you were out in the fresh air at all?”

Sheppard actually had to think about that one. It had been a little under a month. He only had a few minutes at a time outside when he was back on Atlantis. “It’s been a while, yeah.”

“We get it, this isn’t going to be as easy as it sounds,” said Blair. “For your team, sure. No problem for them. But this is work. You’re gonna have to train yourself in a whole new way of even thinking, here. And it won’t work unless you back off and acknowledge that. It’s not easy, so stop expecting it to be. You can push yourself. But you’ve got to pay attention to where the limits are. Otherwise you’ll blow right past the line and end up zoned. And once you’re in a zone, you’re the only one who can get yourself out of it.”

The man made sense. Sheppard watched his team load up into the chopper across the tarmac and realized he still hadn’t moved. “Yeah... but I can’t exactly tap out on this one, either,” he said.

Blair shrugged. “If you think you have to, you can. You and Jim can stay here until you’re ready, Sam and I will get the others out there. The idea is to see what you can do, not put you under the first day you get back into the real world.”

The offer was appealing, but Sheppard saw all the man hours that had already been put into getting them this far. He had to get it together or waste entire teams’ time, from Colorado to California. He opened up the new sound-dampeners Sandburg had given him and tried to shrug off the hesitation.

John Sheppard could handle a chopper. He could fly them, he could ride them down, he could walk away. The rotors weren’t going to make him zone because he had a court martial record that said he could be a bigger pain in the ass than a Black Hawk. That was the only plan Sheppard would hold to.

Sandburg kept pace with him easily enough on the way over to the chopper. They were about the same age and build, though Sandburg was only about as tall as McKay, and he was apparently as used to keeping up with Ellison as Sheppard was at staying at least half a step ahead of Ronon. And Sandburg could give pretty good, well-targeted pep talks on the Sentinel thing. Sheppard decided he was liking the new team a little more by the minute and he ushered the new guy into the Black Hawk ahead of him.

When Sheppard climbed into the chopper, Sam handed him a helmet and they were ready to go. The ear plugs helped but he was still clenching his jaw and braced against the overload. He was determined to keep his feet under him, Black Hawk notwithstanding.

And that meant that maybe the Colonel had briefed at least part of Sheppard’s team on the current mission, but he was back to being the boss even if they were on Earth. Once he was hooked into the chopper’s com system, he caught Teyla and Ronon’s attention, leaned toward them to be sure they could see him despite the oddity of their first helicopter ride.

“I don’t care what Carter told you,” he said, speaking clearly and not at all minding that Sam was listening in on the same connection. “If anybody from around here stops you and chats you up, they want to know where you’re from? You tell them you’re from S _an Francisco_. Understood?”

“San Francisco?” asked Teyla. Even Ronon was confused as he rolled the words around.

“San Francisco,” repeated Sheppard. “And you stick with that story until I say otherwise. That’s an order.”

“San Francisco it is,” said Ronon easily.

“And no shooting anybody,” Sheppard clarified. “Just for the record.”

“What if-” Ronon began but Sheppard cut him off.

“If you have to, use Teyla’s weapon. Let her do it,” Sheppard ordered. There would be a lot less paperwork waiting for them that way. He looked to Carter and she nodded her approval of the orders, but did a bad job at hiding her amusement.

*~*~*

**Earth: Beacon Hills Preserve, California**

Sheppard hadn’t taken a ride over birch, pines, and redwoods in a chopper in maybe... ever. It had been a long time since his days in school, and even then he didn’t spend a lot of time camping. It looked very different from the view over a desert, and was very close to some of the rainforest climates they had found traveling through the gate, but now he saw it from the jump seat in front of an open helicopter door. It was fun, even if he did have a headache.

There was no way to keep track of their location from where he was sitting, so he tried to just enjoy the ride. There was a lot to see and smell and hear, even with the extra padding he had employed for the trip. They were only in the air for a few minutes, but it was a challenge to keep his focus anywhere too long.

When the helicopter lowered to the ground and the pilots gave the clear, Sheppard and Ellison jumped from their seats and stayed low as they ran from the sweep of the rotors. It was odd to not have to seek cover, to simply get away from the helicopter as it lurched back into the air. The two men stood at the side of the clearing and watched as the chopper climbed and flew off.

Then everything was quiet. Long blessed minutes of quiet passed as Ellison checked his pack for a bottle of water, found a tree to sit down against, and made a very obvious effort at not going any damn place. And Sheppard wasn’t at all inclined to question the call.

He scouted out a shady spot of his own and set his gear down as a pillow before laying on the forest floor and staring up at way too many trees. He wanted the ocean, but he would take the substitute of the wind through the trees over the sounds of machines and people for a while.

“Where are we?” he asked eventually. He wasn’t sure how long he took to rest, but the chopper had faded from hearing a long time ago, and John had even chanced taking the ear plugs out by then.

“I don’t know,” Ellison replied. “Sandburg’s the one with the maps.”

That didn’t seem like a good idea. Slowly, reluctantly, Sheppard sat up to stare at the Sentinel.

“No maps?” he asked.

“No maps,” Ellison confirmed.

“Carter signed off on that part?” Sheppard wanted the clarification so he could add it to the conversation he planned to have with her later about briefing his team without including him in the same loop before any kind of mission, even friendly ones.

“The idea is to find the others,” replied Ellison. “If you can’t find them, I should be able to. This is a low-risk op in a no-risk location.”

“ _Should_?!” Sheppard stared at the trees around them and the sky, guessing that they weren’t much past ten AM yet. “All the same, this is my team, out in an area none of them know. And I’m guessing we’re somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas, which, okay, yeah, I went to Stanford, but all that taught me is that Sierra Nevada makes a damn good beer. And we were not packed for camping.” He consulted his own pack and frowned as he realized how useless it was for any kind of real survival training. “I mean... have you ever even _heard_ of the Donner Party?”

Ellison shrugged it off, not apparently concerned. “I guess you’d better get working on looking for them then.”

Sheppard stared at him. “Wait. That’s it?” he asked. “I’m just supposed to pick a direction, hope for the best?”

“And avoid cliffs, hunting traps, and traffic, yeah,” said Ellison. “You want to be your own baseline, Colonel. That means working on your instincts. Training yourself how to trust the right information that your senses are giving you.”

“Yeah, but my sense of direction right now isn’t that great to start with,” Sheppard pointed out. “I got lost leaving the _mess hall_.”

“Underground, in a network of tunnels, that all look the same and are completely magnetically shielded and screw with any directional technology that’s not wired in,” pointed out Ellison. “You’re a pilot, which means you can navigate, which means your sense of direction is fine. Now we can find out if you can still tap into the overload that your senses are giving you. Which means you gotta find the team on your own. I’m just along for the ride.”

Mentally kicking himself for not having had the guts to retire when he’d been given the chance, Sheppard got to his feet and pulled his pack onto his shoulders again. He went from chill to cranky in 4.5 seconds and didn’t feel bad about it. On his team, he still outranked Ellison.

“Let’s get going then,” he ordered. Ellison didn’t complain as he stood. He waited, watching and probably way too smug about the whole mission.

“Where to, Boss?”

Sheppard had to work to ignore him. He looked around at the trees, out into the clearing they had been dropped off at, around to the other direction which seemed to slant ever so slightly upward. He didn’t know how he was supposed to just find people in the middle of nowhere. He could maybe try listening for McKay’s voice, because there was no way they were getting away with dumping McKay in the middle of nature and nothing without having to listen to him bitch the whole time about it.

Out of sheer frustration, Sheppard picked a direction and started walking. Ellison waited him out and then let him take the lead. After a few yards, however, something in his head said he was going the wrong way. So Sheppard changed course and started off again.

*~*~*


	10. Chapter 10

It wasn’t that McKay didn’t like planes or Earth technology in general, but flying around in circles with the doors of the helicopter wide open seemed like excessive showing off. He watched unhappily as the chopper lowered yet again at another flat mountain top clearing and Carter gave Ronon and Teyla the basics on how to bail from a perfectly functional helicopter and his teammates disappeared into waist-high grasses and weeds. He saw them again when the Black Hawk took an unnecessarily sharp turn as it left the area and McKay was able to look down from the center seat to see them standing to watch the helicopter fly off.

Carson and Sam sat on either side of him, keeping Rodney safely in the vehicle, but it was only a small reassurance. They were being paired off. First Sheppard and the new guy Ellison, and then Teyla and Ronon, which left McKay on his own with either Carson or Carter, neither of whom were known for their hiking skills, and really McKay would much rather be back at the base than out in the sun. He hadn’t packed any SPF because for the last month he had been operating under the assumption that Sheppard wasn’t allowed in uncontrolled environments, such as... wherever they were.

There was a flicker of hope as the chopper circled its way back into what seemed like the edges of civilization. The trees turned into grass and the grass had breaks of roads, and then parking lots along what looked like an old highway. To McKay’s delight, the helicopter started to land again in a grassy field just past the parking lot of a familiar-enough looking coffee shop. He would definitely be able to charge his tablet in a Starbucks.

“Oh, perfect. Thank you,” he said, unable to contain the relief at the sight.

“This isn’t your stop,” said Carter. She patted Rodney on the shoulder as he looked at her, mildly horrified by the implication.

“Excuse me?” he asked, loud over the noise in the chopper. He couldn’t have heard her correctly. Carter pointed at Sandburg in the seat across from them.

“You’re with Blair! Carson and I will be here, reviewing the notes Dr. Sandburg gave us...” As she shouted back at him, her comm mic already disabled, she and Carson both traitorously started releasing their seat belts and harness straps. They were really leaving him. He looked over at Sandburg, who didn’t look at all flustered by the arrangement. Even Carson was smiling. That guilty smile he got when he knew something. Did he know he was going to get to sit at a _coffee shop_ when they left that morning?

“Why did no one tell me-” but by the time the complaint was out, Sam and Carson were already running away from the chopper blades over their heads. McKay leaned forward and tried to yell after them, “At least bring me a coffee!”

Sam just waved and gave the pilot the thumbs up. The helicopter went back up into the air then. Rodney sat back in the seat and tried to tell himself he wasn’t surprised. Nor offended. Because he could have been sitting in a cafe drinking coffee all day and no one had even given him the option.

“This is not fair,” he said, staring out the open door as the Starbucks disappeared again. Across from him, Sandburg wasn’t quite laughing, but he was at least grinning the same way Carson and Sam had.

“Hey, man, it’ll be fine. We won’t be that far away,” Sandburg told him. McKay huffed a sigh at the offered reassurance. The chopper didn’t fly in circles this time, and in a few minutes, they started to land again. McKay noted they had flown over three different coffee shops and what looked like a university before setting down near a ravine above the small city.

“This is our stop,” said Blair. He took the headset off and then released the harness, which meant that the first thing he did was mute Rodney’s complaints. Reluctantly, McKay reminded himself that they were working to keep the team together and help Sheppard. He could deal with a day of being bored in the middle of nowhere if he had to.

McKay collected his gear and followed Sandburg out of the helicopter.

“Why couldn’t we have all gotten a nice coffee shop,” McKay complained at Sandburg once the chopper was gone.

“Because it’s not likely Colonel Sheppard would rely on his senses if they could just get in the car and check out the drive thrus between here and Beale,” replied the Guide.

“But it’s not likely he can find us here, either,” said McKay, confused and annoyed by the logic. He saw nothing wrong with the drive thru option. Blair smiled at him and waved him over to where the man stood on the edge of the cliff. He pointed McKay’s attention up along the valley it created that went eastward back into the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

“Sheppard is exactly five miles that way. Straight up the valley here. There’s no way he can miss any of us,” said Blair. McKay seemed confused, looked from the eastern view to the west. If he were to be able to figure out how to scale the cliff and walk another mile or two west, he could get himself to the coffee shop they had left Carson at. He crept to the edge and looked down, considering it, now that he knew the approximate lay of the land. Sandburg seemed to read his mind and pulled him back from the edge to steer him toward the treeline instead.

“Where are we?” McKay asked.

“Uh, Northern California,” replied Sandburg. He pointed down to the west and the coffee shops. “There’s a university down there somewhere, but it’s an ag school, so I’m betting Sheppard doesn’t know the area.”

“Of course he doesn’t know the area. None of us will know the area. This is mildly insane,” said McKay. “We’ll die of exposure before he can find us.”

Blair scoffed. “Seriously? How long can it take him to clear five miles of clear terrain?”

McKay paused to consider it. “Okay, maybe not die. But do you know how hot it gets in the summers in Northern California? Triple degree heat. And I didn’t bring my sunscreen. Because nobody told me-”

“Rodney. Literally all we have to do is sit right here. In the shade. And not die,” said Blair patiently. He settled himself down on a comfortable looking rock in the shade and shrugged out of his jacket. “We _shouldn’t_ be here long enough to die, anyway.”

“Well, where’s the radio? Check and see where they are. I need food and sustenance and my bed. I don’t need to get lost in... wherever we are,” McKay suggested.

“Beacon Hills, I think,” said Blair. He pointed west, back behind the trees that surrounded them now. “Closest urban area.”

“With the coffee shops,” said McKay. Blair nodded.

“You’re catching on, this is good,” he said.

McKay wasn't as amused as Sandburg. "Still. Radio Sheppard. Make sure he's going the right way," McKay prompted again. He found a rock of his own and sat down to sort his available supplies, just to make sure he didn't have to hike himself to the coffee shop.

"Oh, I don't have the radio. Jim has it," said Sandburg. "He and Sheppard are the only ones on the move, the rest of us are supposed to stay where we were dropped off. I think the others have their radios though."

Surprised at the news, McKay looked up from his inventory project. "Wait... why don't you have a radio then?"

"Policy is not to leave a Sentinel with a radio," said Blair, shrugging at something he didn't seem to personally agree with. "The white noise from the static can... be a problem. So Jim has mine."

"That _policy_ is a _problem_ ," said McKay. "Sheppard needs a radio if we're supposed to get back in the field."

"And when he gets stable, we can bend the rules a little. I gave my radio to Jim. He'll be fine with it. Colonel Sheppard is the unknown, currently, and he wasn't given a radio." Blair was very dedicated to his no-worries vibe on this mission and McKay just wasn't catching it.

"What about Teyla and Ronon? They don't know this planet, they could get very lost, very quickly, and-"

"They were told to stay put until they were found. That is literally the entire point in this mission," Blair interrupted. "Carter explained it to them this morning at breakfast, and they understood. They will either be found first and the chopper will be back to pick us up before rush hour traffic hits the coffee shop, or they'll be waiting exactly where we left them when we go to pick them up at the end of the day."

McKay scrunched up his jacket and stuffed it into his pack, too frustrated to form coherent words. "Nobody explained it to _me_ at breakfast."

"Yeah, well, you and Sheppard slept in. We figured you'd catch on eventually," said Sandburg. He tossed something over to Rodney. He caught it and was surprised to discover the man had brought along sufficient SPF sunscreen to get McKay through what was undoubtedly going to be a miserable day.

"Thanks," he said.

"No problem," replied Sandburg easily. "You better now?"

"No. I'm anticipating baking in about an hour and there is still far too much Irish in my genetic code to handle California," said McKay. Not to mention the still healing burns on his shoulder that he was resolutely refusing to consider yet for the sake of his own sanity.

"How do you usually go on missions then?" said Blair. "It's the same sun wherever you go."

"That is not in fact true," replied McKay.

Sandburg waited a beat before he lined up a new question. "What did you mean about Teyla and Ronon not being from this planet?"

McKay was caught off guard by the question while he still had an undignified glob of sunscreen across his face. He stalled by rubbing at his face to clear it, mentally replaying the conversation to see where it went off the rails on him.

"I didn't say that," he finally concluded.

"Nope, but it was very definitely inferred by your comment and a few other things this morning," Sandburg said.

"I thought you were cleared to join the team and go back when we do?"

"We are. We locked up our place and gave the plants to the kid down the hall because we'll be gone," said the nosey and yet uninformed Guide. "And I was told that I've got Sheppard's clearance, because they wanted me to stick with him until he's on his feet again. Where he goes, I go, except for this so Jim can get him rated."

The answer only confused McKay more. "Then why haven't you been read in on what our mission _actually_ _is_?"

"Well, first, we've been a little busy. We got the orders three days ago," said Blair with a shrug. "And my guess is a lot of the reason is that I've been with Jim. People get antsy talking about classified shit around Sentinel. I'm normally the messenger on that stuff."

"What? Why?” McKay asked. He viewed anything Sentinel through the lense of how it worked with life as he knew it for John Sheppard, and Sandburg’s theory didn’t track with any part of life on Atlantis. “People have to talk around John. Otherwise he can't do his job."

"I'm guessing you didn't get read in on Sheppard since his gene woke up, huh?"

McKay swatted at a fly buzzing around his head and felt impossibly put out by the whole trip. "I'm a scientist, I kinda have things to do. Taking care of John is what Carson is for."

"Well... This is all just what I’ve observed the last few years. It’s not that people don’t talk to them, I guess. It’s just that a room can get pretty quiet when they walk in,” Sandburg explained. “Maybe they don’t want to mess with Jim’s hearing... but I doubt that. I always figured people don't talk around Sentinel because they're walking human lie detectors. They can overhear conversations three rooms away, tune in to physiological responses to any given environment, and people who have to deal with politicians a lot will just shut up rather than talk. But a Sentinel _spying_ on a room they happen to be standing in can offend a lot of important people in high places who have to lie for a living. That's why any trained Sentinel gets the tattoo in the first place. So the right people know to shut up."

"Which _I_ believe is _highly_ illegal _and_ a violation _and_ wrong _and_ I don’t understand why he went along with it," said Rodney. It wasn’t like Sheppard needed a tattoo to look cool or something, with his permanently messed up hair and the whole shooting things without freaking out first. It was a huge overstep.

"That's the price to avoid a lifetime in the brig for stealing state secrets," said Blair. He found a small twig and started shredding leaves and bark. “If they overhear or see something they shouldn’t, and don’t know to keep their mouths shut, they’re the ones who get in trouble, not the actual leak. It can get pretty ugly.”

“Did I mention that I very much don’t like how the Sentinel Project chose to run things?” replied McKay. “Because I don’t. And I am very much looking forward to either getting John back to the... our post... where they can’t reach him, or - my personal preference - turning the genes off so they don’t care again.”

"You can't turn the genes off," said Blair. "That's not how it works."

"Oh, no, I assure you, we can turn them all off. We just haven't figured out which ones do _what_ exactly, in this instance," replied McKay, shrugging it off. He didn't actually feel like explaining it to Sandburg because he didn't want to assume too much about the man's eventual clearance on all things Top Secret. It would be irresponsible at best.

"You can't though," insisted Sandburg. "Do you even understand what you're suggesting?" The question was mildly offensive but the man didn't give Rodney a chance to respond. He jumped off his rock perch and started pacing, shedding nervous energy unconsciously in a very familiar way.

"You're suggesting turning off all sensory input if you're talking about deactivating the ProX. Sight, smell, touch, hearing... all of it. Gone," said Sandburg. "The gene alters the body. It merges and replaces those command codes entirely. That's why it has to be activated. That trigger... well, whatever it is that activates the code, it triggers the system to replace it. It doesn't add a few lines as they grow. It replaces them under force of situational evolution and adaptation."

Rodney hesitated, working the suggestion over in his own genius brain rather than trust Sandburg. The hippie doctor just shook his head at him for it.

"The only way to deactivate the ProX, once it's been activated, is to disable the sense entirely. You would leave him blind, deaf, and with no pain receptors to keep him from hurting himself," said Sandburg. He paused and looked over at Rodney, an odd sort of frustration and maybe anger on his face and in his voice.

"Look, I read Beckett's notes. I know Sheppard wants to just turn it off and be done with it. I get it, trust me. You'd be hard pressed to find somebody who hates the Sentinel Project more than me, okay? But Sheppard doesn't even know what he can do yet. And once he gets a handle on it, he'll be fine. But if you go trying to turn it off... the adjustment is ten times worse, and the outcome... isn't great. It's the opposite of anything somebody like him would want, and the last thing you would ever want to see him go through."

"I said I'd try to look into it..." said Rodney. Admittedly, he hadn't tried very hard. He didn't really bother to take notice of what any of the Sentinel stuff really was until Carson had sent him the Project manual. Before then, it was some medical problem that McKay had been certain Carson would sort out. It didn't get real until somebody started shoehorning his team into a little red-tape box; that was a lot more than just Sheppard having weird headaches and fainting spells that messed with Ancient tech.

"Look into letting Sheppard try finding a baseline, so he can feel normal again with what he's got," said Sandburg. "You wanna help him figure this stuff out? Help him tell the difference between something five feet away, or something fifty. Don't raise your voice around him for a while, so he can figure out the difference between a whisper, or talking, or yelling. That stuff is all messed up on him right now. Those zone outs? That's his system trying to... reboot to the baseline when he can't tell what it is that he's sensing because he's picking up everything at once. He just needs stuff he can focus on without blocking out everything else."

"Oh," was all McKay managed to say as he processed the new information. It wasn't often that he met someone who could talk circles around him about anything, but Sandburg certainly had a lot of stored up facts to share. And McKay knew next to nothing. He frowned.

"Is all this in that book you gave us? I mean, him? That Sam took," he asked.

"Yeah, along with a bunch of studies and statistics and evidence to show these people aren't crazy, they just... have a whole new experience of the same old life," said Blair. "It takes a lot of work to convince the military not to throw out the whole baby when the bathwater just got a little cold."

Again, McKay considered the situation. If Sheppard could get the sensory baseline problem under control, there would be no need for altering any genetic structures. He could go back to Atlantis, and maybe open up a whole new avenue of exploration as the evolved ATA interacted with more of the Ancient tech.

McKay saw only an iceberg tip. "Well do you have another one of the books handy?" he asked. "What about the Cliff Notes version? Anything? We're apparently not going anywhere for a while."

*~*~*

Walking in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, in a particular section of nowhere that Sheppard had zero conceptual familiarity with to begin with, felt like an exercise in absolute futility. Not that John would usually side with the negative whining of one Rodney McKay, but he really, really wanted to start whining. Or shooting things. And he could do neither of those options. First because his pride wouldn’t let him, and second because he had no guns to shoot anything with anyway.

He had spent a few weeks in and out of the infirmary, so Sheppard was used to walking around without the weight of his service weapon when indoors. But out in the middle of growing forests, it was another story. He felt... twitchy. He didn’t have a gun, so John scratched at the fresh plastic bandage along his palm so he would stop checking the empty holster at his leg. The tattoo seemed to be healing okay, but he didn’t remember them being that annoying in general, and poking at the plastic gave him something to keep both hands occupied.

“You’re absolutely positive this is the entirety of this plan, right?” Sheppard finally asked Ellison. “Just... walk. Until we find somebody.”

“Well... how absolutely positive are you that you’re walking the right direction?” the Sentinel captain replied. He didn’t seem concerned at all. Sheppard reached out and caught him by the arm and pulled him up to a stop, facing him directly.

“I get that this is supposed to be some kind of test, or assessment, but it feels more like a game and a waste of time,” said John. “So let’s take a minute and cut through the red tape and bullshit of what goes on paperwork. Just a second here. What exactly is this supposed to get anybody, other than a day off in the park? I mean, Teyla and Ronon are probably fine with this, wherever they are. But McKay and Beckett aren’t exactly the outdoor type. You send them outside for an afternoon on their own and they come back with bugs and bitching. This isn’t... fun.”

“It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s like I told you, a test on your senses, to check your range, see how you handle it,” replied Ellison. The annoying thing was that he seemed perfectly serious with the answer, as if it solved the mystery.

Sheppard waved the man’s attention around at the woods they were surrounded by. “Unless you’re telling me that somewhere out here, somebody’s torturing a member of my team, and I should be hearing them screaming right now, I don’t see how I could be picking them up with my sense of hearing or sight.”

“That’s fair,” replied Ellison with a nod. He glanced briefly at the watch on his wrist. “We’ve been walking for about a half an hour. Why’d you pick this direction?”

Sheppard didn’t have an intelligent answer for that. “I guessed. Because you told me to.”

“Guess... instinct... your gut said walk west, so you walked west,” said Ellison. Sheppard nodded.

“Yeah, basically,” he said.

“Something to keep in mind, Colonel? What we call instinct is often informed by unconscious perception. We notice something that maybe we’re not processing. Maybe we hear something but we’re not right on top of it, so we can’t recognize what it is. We see something between some tree branches, but we don’t pay attention to it because there’s a few hundred other branches and tree trunks between us and it. Doesn’t mean we didn’t pick up on it. It means we weren’t consciously aware of it. That other stuff? Rattles around. Has to go somewhere. And sometimes, if we process something important, we call it instinct.”

It wasn’t exactly crazytalk. Sheppard was familiar enough with battlefield responses, turning to fire a weapon before even fully realizing he had seen a bad guy there. It was why they trained, from the military to cops, to firefighters, was to practice relying on the stuff that gets picked up in the peripheral, to make sure nothing important is missed that could cost anyone their lives. Sheppard crossed his arms and mulled it over.

“So you’re saying maybe we’re not going the wrong way and I’m not wasting everybody’s time,” he eventually concluded. Ellison shrugged at him, his expression behind the sunglasses looking more amused than annoyed.

“I’m saying this is your mission, and if you say we’re going the right way, then... we’re probably going the right way,” replied Ellison. Again, not the answer Sheppard was looking for.

“Okay. So. If he’s out there with my team, then check in with Sandburg,” he challenged. “Make sure we’re going the right way.”

“Can’t,” said Ellison. “I’ve got Blair’s radio. Only way to check in with him is to find him.”

“So can you find him then?” Sheppard asked, not so much testing as actually curious. “He’s the Guide, right? Is that, like, some kind of built-in feature? If the whole pairing off thing is so important, is that part of it?”

"Right now, I could track him. Because _I_ was paying attention when the chopper left. I have a good idea of where to start looking," replied Ellison.

"Okay, well, first of all, that's not fair because I have been in the dark on this entire mission since the gene woke up," said Sheppard. "If I had known... anything at all, really, I could have taken a stab at following the chopper, too."

"It's not exactly a carnival for anybody, Colonel. We're all just out here trying to make stuff make sense, and sometimes that means we gotta waste a day in the woods, making sure we don't lose our senses," said Ellison. "The expectation that there's always a right answer and a tight timeline isn't going to help."

“Except _that’s_ my life, on the clock and no room for error or somebody gets dead,” said Sheppard. If Ronon had been around, there probably would have been problems, because he wasn’t adjusting well to Ellison’s blunt manner and the Satedan would have gladly taken advantage of Sheppard’s attitude to angle for his spar. John at least was smart enough to stay back from the Sentinel, fully aware that the captain was the one carrying the gun. “And while maybe on this mission, my team is, I dunno, maybe they’re out here fishing somewhere, who knows. They might not be in danger right now, which I _appreciate_ that, just for the record... but my gut says I’m wasting time.”

“There’s a difference between habit and fact,” replied Ellison. “Fact is that you are a liability to them until you _can_ stand out here all day, see what you need to, hear what you need to, and not have to rely on sunglasses and ear plugs to keep from falling on your face. Fact is that you don’t do good in enclosed environments, either. And fact is that you’re great at getting in your own way trying to do things the way you used to. So we’ll start with the absolute crazy basics if we have to until you reset the habits. No maps. No radios. No team. Until you find them.”

“I haven’t zoned out once since we’ve been out here,” said Sheppard, annoyed that the man was right.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to notice that,” Ellison replied. “Pretty good since we haven’t even hiked a mile yet. Haven’t found anyone yet, either, but at least you’re paying attention.”

“We’re in the woods. There are trees. And... and Bambi. What else am I supposed to be paying attention to?” Sheppard asked.

“There’s a river about, I dunno, maybe not even a mile that way,” said Ellison, pointing north east. He shifted enough to point due west. “And a city there. Probably about three miles. And there’s a road not far from here. It probably gets us into town if you want food to take care of the Hangry you’re working on.”

Sheppard looked in each direction, surprised by the information.

“It’s a headache,” he muttered, clarifying the hangry even though he was loath to admit to either of the possibilities. Then he looked back at Ellison. “How’d you know all that? Did you see the maps?”

“Nope. I can hear them. I’m used to picking those sounds out of the static that’s giving you a headache,” the man replied. “I can smell the water. And there’s an animal trail right there, habitable areas, they’re getting around pretty regularly for something.”

“So... practice,” observed Sheppard. Ellison nodded.

“And time. I’ve been doing this longer than you. That’s all,” he said. Sheppard sighed, frustrated, and scrubbed at his face. He didn’t have years to get good. He had a week and then he wanted to go back home. He took a chance and shoved the glasses up to rest on top of his head, chanced looking around without the sunglasses. There was only one way to practice using his senses.

“Okay. Any pointers to the not falling on my face part?” he asked, squinting as the light through the trees stabbed at his eyes. Ellison watched him struggle with it for a moment before he shrugged.

“Yeah, there are a few,” he said finally. “But it’s just as much work to nail them as it is anything else. So the shortcuts don’t save you much effort yet. You’re too green.”

“Try me, Ellison,” said Sheppard. The big captain shrugged at the challenge.

“Okay, here’s the easy one,” Ellison said. “You can do this with anybody on the team, but it’s better when it’s off someone you know pretty well and have a good sense for. For now, you can fake it, just get the read off me like you would them.”

That was curious and Sheppard tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “Okay... what’s that then?”

“You can hear me standing here talking to you. You can hear me breathing. Those change, not consistent patterns, so if you try to tune in too close, you can get in trouble if I change volume or hold my breath,” said Ellison. “So try to hear my heartbeat. Put the work into listening for that, and let the other noises sit in the background.”

Sheppard pulled a face. This was not his favorite part about the whole heightened senses thing. He had put active effort into blocking out the sound of other people’s bodily functions for the past month.

“Couldn’t I just try to listen for the river instead?” he asked.

“Sure, if you can find it. There’s also wind, there’s the highway, there’s birds and bugs... can you hear the river?” Ellison asked with feigned patience. Sheppard tried and failed. He heard a lot of static that made his head pound harder. Reluctantly he shook his head in an easily denied negative.

“Try it,” said Ellison. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

The only thing John had to lose at this point was probably his sanity because listening to random strangers’ insides was a whole new level of weird when CPR wasn’t involved, and Ellison was now seriously suggesting he make a habit of it. So, reluctantly, Sheppard closed his eyes and tried to listen for the predictable ‘thum-thump’ of a human heartbeat.

It presented itself among the static of forest sounds gradually and Sheppard found himself listening more intently. As the heartbeat got clearer, so did the sound of a bird. It sounded nearby, but not close enough to be worried about the two humans standing under the trees. A finch tweeted at them.

Sheppard hadn’t heard birds since... probably since the prison planet, really. Atlantis didn’t have many. He got distracted listening for other birds and heard a falcon cry somewhere far overhead. It was loud, stronger than the smaller bird calls under the trees, and John realized he had stopped listening for the human sounds. He found the heartbeat again and it didn’t sound... right. Then he heard an echo of a voice over it and realized the problem.

Sheppard opened his eyes and quickly realized that he hadn’t been breathing. He coughed to catch up again and soon noticed Ellison now stood at his shoulder, ready to catch him. Well, at least he hadn’t fallen on his face.

“I’m not sure that worked so good,” he told Ellison. “I zoned.”

“I saw. But what did you hear?”

“Birds,” replied Sheppard. He could faintly hear them under the static. And he could hear Ellison still, but it didn’t bother him so much. He squinted and looked around, trying to see things that he could at least kind-of still hear. Branches in the wind, even a small animal, maybe a hare or a squirrel somewhere close enough he could hear the tiny heartbeat as the paws scrambled around. And under it all, he could still hear Ellison.

“Okay... I think I got it now,” said Sheppard. Finally something about his existence felt familiar and he snapped his fingers as he caught on. “It’s like McKay and his complaining. When we were stuck in the mines, it was mostly too dark to see, so I focused on trying to find light, but I was still listening for McKay and Ronon. Kind of... splitting my attention as I tracked my team.”

“You were distracted and working on autopilot. The cave kept you out of your own way,” said Ellison.

“Not a cave. A mine. Noise and smoke everywhere, and dark. God damned prison planet with no electricity,” said John. He was distracted again, trying to listen to birds, and Ellison, and find the sound of the river Jim had mentioned. It was something that might actually work out.

“Prison planet?” asked Ellison. His tone held the kind of confusion that belied worry about someone’s sanity. Oh.

“It’s a long story,” said John. “I’ll have to get you the report when we get back to the base.”

Ellison seemed to accept it for a minute and Sheppard started walking again, trusting his gut that he was following the sound of the river he could almost hear. He wasn’t imagining it, it had to be really there if Ellison had heard it. The Sentinel followed after him without correcting his course.

“Colonel,” Ellison began after a little while. “Where is your team assigned?”

Sheppard pulled a face and stared up at the sky briefly. He couldn’t dodge it forever. “Classified, Captain. But we’re assigned to an exploration expedition. We actually do this-” Sheppard waved at their general surroundings, “Kinda stuff a lot, really. Pick a direction, go look for things. Run into bad guys and... take ‘em out. We stay pretty busy.”

“In between prison planets,” replied Ellison. Sheppard stopped walking and turned to wait for the Sentinel to catch up.

“Like I said. Classified. I’ll make sure you and Sandburg get read in when we get back to Colorado,” he said. He kept them walking but didn’t lead the way this time. “Sandburg said you’re in, so you’ll get briefed. Does your team have much field experience?”

“Sure, _I_ do. Sandburg... none,” replied Jim. Sheppard was still only idly listening to Ellison’s heart rate as he tried to keep track of everything else around them, but it sounded like it had certainly elevated disproportionate to the walking they were doing. Sheppard tilted his head and looked over at the Sentinel, not sure how to read the observation but not sure he wanted to mention it, either.

“So how’s he handle himself?” John asked. “He’s cleared with weapons training, right?”

“Well, he took a semester of the police academy, but that was almost fifteen years ago. The Project made him do boot camp once. He’s a teacher who got stuck behind a desk, Colonel. He can handle himself when he has to, but that doesn’t make him qualified for it,” said Ellison with a shrug.

“Kinda like McKay,” replied Sheppard. “He’s the only one on my team who had to figure out military training along the way. Teyla and Ronon already knew how to fight before I brought them on. If McKay can catch on, I’m sure Sandburg will do fine.”

“He’ll handle it,” agreed Jim. He still seemed a little stressed, even as he tried to dismiss it. John hadn’t meant to leave the man hanging on such an ominous unknown, but there wasn’t a lot of wiggle room for discussing the Pegasus galaxy expedition in the middle of the woods. Sentinel or not, there was no guarantee they were the only two who could hear the briefing Ellison was certainly owed.

“Anyway, I got a line on that river,” Sheppard offered. He pointed to where the sounds of the river seemed to be coming from. “There.”

Ellison nodded. “Better. What about your team?”

“Still working on that,” said Sheppard. Even still, he stepped up the pace toward the river.

*~*~*


	11. Chapter 11

**Earth: Beacon Hills Preserve, California**

It had been a few days since the blow up at the loft, but Stiles wasn’t sure exactly how many. Time kind of went wonky on him for a while because of the drugs he’d been fed by the bad guys. At least now he knew who they were: a pack of former Alpha psychopath werewolves who collected power by killing betas. Now they were after Scott, the True Alpha, whatever that meant.

All Stiles knew was that, thanks to Scott, they had his dad as a new recruit.

Stiles didn’t know how the fight at the loft had settled out because he had spent a couple of days passed out. He was afraid to go back to the Argents to find out. They would talk to social services, and social services would send Stiles to get tested, and he would fail. And then they’d lock him up in a group home for addicts, so every werewolf in the county could use him as a chew toy. No thanks, hard pass.

Instead, he stayed with Derek, camping out at what was left of the Hale house. Derek said it was just until the drugs were completely out of Stiles’ system, and that he still had to go back to the Argents. With the Alphas around, especially while they had Stiles’ dad, staying with the Argents was the safest alternative.

Thanks to Stiles’ disappearing from their home in the first place, the Argents and their hunter hobbyists now knew about the Alpha pack. And they knew that the presence of the Alpha pack had thrown all the local packs into survival mode. It was Open Season as far as the hunters were concerned, because there was no discernible difference between a regular werewolf pack like Scott's and the crazy psycho of Blind Deucalion and his Alphas. Stiles just hoped they didn’t know about his dad. That would somehow make everything worse.

When Stiles wasn’t as badly looped out and not as likely to hurt himself wandering the Hale house, Derek had gone back to try to find Boyd and Isaac and the others. The only safe place was the school for the other teens, because Principal Gerald couldn’t exactly take them out during Chem. Derek found hunter search parties using the Argents as a base of operations.

Considering the Argents’ favorite werewolf pack to use for target practice was the surviving members of the Hale pack, Derek’s old burned out hovel of a house in the woods wasn’t any safer for them than going back to the loft would be. They were chased out one night, into the woods, and hadn’t been able to go back. Derek found a place to hide in a bizarre root cellar under a tree, a place he said he and his cousins had played in when they were kids. He’d hidden a jar filled with rocks in one of the earthen shelves when he was 12, and he found it just as easily in the dark when he was 20. They moved their ‘camp out’ to the dark cellar, where Stiles fell asleep leaned against an underground tree trunk and Derek kept watch at the steps.

The next morning, very little light crept in between the wood slats of the cellar doors, but it was enough to see the large black wolf stretched out at the base of the stairs.

“Oh my god,” blurted Stiles. He blinked his eyes and tried to wake himself up. He hadn’t exactly been sleeping great, so alertness was a tall order, but under the circumstances he had appropriate incentive. Werewolves were werewolves. His werewolves didn’t turn into their four legged dog-cousin the wolf. They had always remained the two-legged gargantuan humanoids with long finger-claws and over-sized mouths to fit in over-sized fangs. And yet somehow Stiles found himself locked in a dug-out root cellar with an actual wolf between him and the only way out.

“Please tell me you’re Derek,” he said. Because talking to strange wolves was a perfectly normal thing to do. The wolf looked over at him and thumped his tail. Stiles almost jumped out of his skin.

“No way!” he yelped, stammering for a more intelligent, coherent response to the absolute awesome mystery in front of him. The wolf moved to stand, even stretched his back in that very-definitely-a-dog thing, and carried the backpack filled with food over to Stiles. It held the quickest things he could grab on their stop at the last gas station out of town: PopTarts and beef jerky. Stiles stared at the wolf even as he dug blindly in the bag for breakfast.

“Are you kidding me with this? No shit, you’re really a wolf now?” he asked. “I didn’t get drugged again or something, right?”

The wolf blinked at him with a very-definitely Hale-judgement face before shaking his head and going back to sitting by the stairs. Very definitely a judgey Hale wolf.

“Holy shit,” said Stiles. He chomped on a PopTart and tried to process the new werewolf revelation. It made sense. That’s how they had found Laura Hale months earlier, as a dead, partial wolf. But this was Derek. He was a clumsy idiot. Idiot werewolves couldn’t do cool things like change into a wolf and just chill out. It took a minute to get used to.

After that, Derek stayed a wolf. It was probably easier to keep track of the bad guys in the woods as a wolf. Stiles curled up that night on a fur pillow and actually got real sleep. Derek was a lot less grouchy as a wolf. Stiles pointed that out the next morning and got bit on the arm for it.

“You better have had your shots,” Stiles grumbled at him for it. Derek didn’t find it quite as funny and chased Stiles out of the cellar.

It was another summer day in Beacon Hills already, too hot for his jacket, so Stiles stuffed the hoodie in the food backpack. He followed the wolf to the creek channel that ran through the woods. Water was actually a really good idea. Stiles dropped the pack by a tree, even left his shirt on the stack. He was pretty rank and tired of it, now that he wasn’t sick all the time. Stiles wasn’t sure if it was safe to go back to the Argents' yet, so the only shower he had access to was the creek water to wash his face and dunk his head.

Stiles went out among the rocks and crouched over the edge of the water. It was colder than he expected, so he did more splashing his hands in it than anything else, just trying to get used to it. Derek the wolf walked out into the water until all four massive paws were covered, lapped at the running water he stood in. Clear blue eyes stared back at Stiles’ ginger efforts, adding excessive judgement to the obvious challenge. Stiles shrugged it off and edged a little more out into the water himself.

He really should have expected it, but Stiles was caught off guard when Derek pounced and toppled him face-first into the creek. There was no way to know if it was his way of playing or if he was just tired of Stiles’ unshowered stench after so long.

“Jerk,” Stiles complained at him, sitting on his ass on the creek bed, with icy water up to his ribs. If wolves could laugh, the expression on Derek’s face was probably as close as it could get.

Stiles spent the next few hours trying to dry off. The pair of them wandered further up into the woods than Stiles was used to going. He didn’t exactly have anywhere else to be, and he had some food left, though he wasn’t sure how long it would hold up. Derek the wolf could chow down on roadkill and raw squirrels, but Stiles wasn’t going to try cooking vermin for dinner any time soon.

It was probably around mid-afternoon that Derek disappeared. He wasn’t gone long, but it was a noticed absence. When he came back, the wolf caught Stiles by the edge of his shirt and started tugging, hard. Nothing about his body language said he was playing. So when Derek turned and ran, Stiles followed. They went higher into the foothills, and Derek led Stiles out onto one of the cliff overlooks. Stiles looked down toward where they had run from and saw an access road that wound off from the highway. Trucks were parked along the access road, not just one or two but a whole group. None of them were Park Ranger or Sheriffs trucks.

“You think it’s hunters?” he asked Derek. The response was a snort and slight head-toss, which seemed like an affirmative. Stiles backed off from the edge of the hill and picked his way back toward the trees, keeping his head down. Going back to the cellar would be a bad idea. It was too close to the Hale house.

Stiles was running low on ideas that made sense, and even lower on energy. Around sundown it was still too warm for a hoodie, but Stiles realized he could smell a fire. He looked to Derek, but the wolfy face was harder to read than the human one. Stiles decided to check it out. The worst case scenario was that he had to deal with hunters on his own, and Derek could get back to whatever he did with his life when he wasn’t babysitting Stiles. At least Stiles had the option of using the Argents as a get out of jail free space and would just have to pray the drugs were out of his system before Social Worker Pant Suit caught up to him.

Best case scenario was that he could beg a hot meal off a camper because no one else would be starting a fire when the temperature had barely made it back into the 70-degree range. All the same, Derek followed after him, so Stiles felt like he might survive his own curiosity for once.

He followed his nose to a campsite down the hillside along the creek, in the narrow valley ravine formed by the foothills. People lived down in the valley, though not very close to the creek since it flooded every spring. The campers with the fire were probably just day-campers, which significantly improved the odds of bumming free food.

“Are you sure it’s okay we came down here?” Stiles heard someone ask. There were two guys at the fire pit, one of them in a black and gray shirt and jeans, and the other in TACAM camo BDUs with a belt and empty holster, so probably some kind of military. Stiles didn’t recognize the patches on their backpacks, but they weren’t carrying weapons, so they weren’t hunters.

“Yeah, it’ll be fine. If you’d told me about your shoulder sooner, we could have started out down here so you didn’t get dehydrated,” came the reply. Stiles seemed satisfied that it wasn’t the conversation of psychopaths and stepped out to a more obvious path to disturb their attention.

“Honestly, if you’d just let me stay at the Starbucks, there would be a less than zero chance of dehydration,” the one in black was saying. He trailed off as he noticed Stiles walking up on them. “Uhm...”

“Hi... Are you okay?” asked the one in the urban camo BDUs and the black shirt. He was looking right at Stiles, the wolf following him only a minor side-note. From a few feet away, it was clear the man couldn’t actually be military because he had long curly hair pulled back in a frizzy ponytail, and what Stiles had originally thought were dog tags hanging around his neck was really a rock of some sort, like jade or something. Nothing about the guy really said he kept to regulation _anything_. The other guy didn’t look like he had enough hair on his head to remember what a comb was. Great. They were old guys. Better food selection, hopefully.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I think,” Stiles replied, confused by the concern. “Why?”

“Kid... when was the last time you saw a mirror?” asked the one who looked like a grown-up nerd. The question was mildly offensive, considering the source. “You look like you stepped out of a war zone. And there’s not supposed to be any of those around here.”

Oh.

Stiles looked down at his days-old muddy clothes and over at Derek, annoyed the man hadn’t told him he looked hurt. Just because he was hurt didn’t mean he wanted to advertise.

“I mean... we pissed off some guys who don’t like my dog. They’re out there, back on the ridge,” Stiles said, waving a hand toward the part of the forest where they had seen the trucks. “That was a few days ago, I guess.”

“A few days- you’ve been out here? Do you live out here?”

“I think what my friend is getting at is did we camp in your spot? It’s probably not easy finding a place out here,” asked the guy with the frizzy hair. He seemed calmer and less uptight in general.

“No, it’s cool. I’m... kinda between places, but I’ve got people in the city,” Stiles said.

“Beacon Hills?” the guy asked. Stiles nodded.

“My dad was the sheriff there,” he said.

“Cool,” said the hippie guy. “We’re out here just for the day, running some environmental tests for the Air Force, but I used to work with the PD when I lived in Washington. My name is Blair, and this is my teammate Rodney. Do you want to stick around for a meal with us?”

Blair hadn’t run the offer by Rodney first, but the man’s reaction was more surprise than offense. Stiles had never had to bum food from strangers before, but it went along pretty easy when he had a wolf leaning on his leg. He set his bag down and sat against a tree not far from the men.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m Stiles. And... this is Derek.”

The wolf flopped down like he was tired, not so subtly putting himself between Stiles and the two strangers.

“What’s the story with the wolf?” asked Rodney, the nervous one. “Is he cool with strangers? Or no sudden movements? I’m... not tasty.”

“Yeah, Derek’s okay with you, or I would have kept walking,” said Stiles. It was weird to realize how long it had been since he had dealt with other people in general. He actually didn’t mind the questions because it meant he was around safe people. The other kind of people, the ones he had to look out for, didn’t usually ask questions.

“Right. Well. That’s good then,” said Rodney. He started digging in his backpack, pulled out a tablet computer and started poking at the screen. Stiles had never seen one like it, but Blair had said they were with the military, so it made sense.

“I was going to make some tea. It’s the closest thing I brought to coffee,” said Blair. Stiles pounced at the offer of caffeine.

“I don’t even remember what coffee tastes like,” Stiles realized, a little alarmed by how long it had been since he had any kind of normal in his life. He was probably at least two weeks out from the last time he had seen the Argent’s house, but the only thing “normal” about that was the coffee pot in the kitchen. Victoria didn’t like him drinking coffee, but Stiles didn’t like that she killed people, so he figured she could just deal with it.

“That’s terrible. I can assure you that tea won’t remind you,” Rodney said. The man stood up and walked the tablet over to hand to Stiles. “Here. Just... want to be sure you don’t need us to call in a medic.”

Stiles accepted the tablet, surprised to see it was in video mode and reflecting his own face back at him on the screen. With all the dirt scrubbed off that morning, every bruise and scrape from the week before stood out bright and high-contrast against his pale face. He still looked up, even though the bruises were fading. The Alphas’ claw marks still stood out at his neck.

“Shit.”

Next to him, lying down comfortably, Derek tucked his head down over his crossed paws and turned his nose to rest under Stiles’ knee. If a wolf could look guilty, that one did.

Rodney crouched over his heels not far away, waiting to take the tablet back when Stiles was done with it. He nodded.

“Look. You said your dad’s the sheriff. So if you need a medic who isn’t a local, my friend Carson’s a doctor. He can come out here,” Rodney offered.

“Well, we can’t call him until the others get here,” Blair said. “But once they get here with the radio...”

“It wasn’t my dad or something... He died a few months ago,” Stiles told them. He had accidentally screwed up and wasn’t sure how to lie his way out of it for once. He handed the tablet back to Rodney.

“Oh. I’m sorry...” The man didn’t seem comfortable with the word, even though he sounded very Canadian about it.

“It’s a long story. I just... don’t want to go back to my foster family yet. I’ll be fine. I’ll go back in a few days. They’re looking for me,” Stiles told the two men. They were strangers, military or not. He wanted free food, not more adults causing him trouble.

“Well, it’s not a few days, but... a chopper’s picking us up in a few hours. If you want a ride back into town tonight, we can make it happen,” said Blair.

“Chopper? Like... a helicopter?” Stiles asked.

“A Black Hawk dropped us off, if that’s your thing,” said Rodney. He looked a little green at the topic, probably wasn’t much of a flyer. Stiles had never been on a plane at all, let alone a Black Hawk helicopter. He would be crazy to pass up the free chance. Maybe.

“What do you do?” he asked. “I mean, I get the military part, but -”

“Civilian contractors,” said Blair helpfully as Rodney gaped like a confused fish. “I’m an anthropologist, and Rodney’s a scientist. We’re out here with our team looking at environmental influences on specific populations.”

Rodney shut his mouth and walked away to put the tablet back in his pack. Blair seemed pretty chill, like he could roll with the random surprise of a beat up kid interrupting his work day, but Rodney was jumpy.

“Where’s your team?” asked Stiles. “Were they the guys with the trucks up over the ridge?”

“Nope. Black Hawk, remember?” replied Blair. That wasn’t the best news for Stiles, since it meant he was still in hunter territory. And so were these two unsuspecting military nerds. Great.

“You guys will be out of here before dark though, right?”

“Hopefully. But unfortunately we don’t have a _radio_ to check,” said Rodney.

“Why?” Blair asked Stiles, ignoring Rodney’s complaint.

“There’s hunters out here that get really territorial is all. So it’s better not to be out camping at night lately,” said Stiles.

“Is that what happened to you?” Blair wasn’t pushing, but Stiles had opened a door on the topic and he apparently wasn’t the kind of guy to ignore it. Stiles shrugged at it.

“Kinda? But you guys should probably not hang around all night is my point,” he replied.

“So when we meet back up with our team, we’ll leave when the chopper gets here, and give you and Derek there a lift back into town,” said Blair. He was decided on the matter anyway, even if Stiles wasn’t sure. Blair sat down not far from Stiles and passed over the mug-lid of a heavy-duty metal thermos. The water canteen had been sitting in the fire pit to boil, so Blair used his jacket as an oven-mitt to pour water into another canteen for Rodney.

“There. Cap it and drop it back in the creek for a minute, and you’ve got clean drinking water again,” Blair told his friend.

“This doesn’t take care of everything, you know that, right? It’s just boiled. It might not have reached temperature. And I... have a currently compromised system because I’m not used to this area...” Rodney rambled on, even as he did as he was told.

“You said you’re healing, you’re dehydrated, and it’s the best we’ve got this time,” Blair called after him.

“What happened to him?” Stiles asked, curious. The man was jumpy but looked normal otherwise, no outward signs of being unhealthy. Unlike Stiles, who apparently looked like he’d been in a war-zone.

“I’m not sure exactly,” said Blair. “But he said that about a month ago he got burned on the shoulder, really badly. So since he’s still healing, he gets dehydrated more easily. I’d guess it was probably third degree burn. So I don’t want to risk it. We can boil water for the day. It’s easy.”

“That creek comes from the snow-pack up in the mountains. It should be okay,” said Stiles.

“I have a very sensitive system. If there’s anything in this, trust me, I’ll find out,” Rodney said. The man liked to complain, but at least maybe he had an excuse. He definitely kept his distance from the fire pit.

“Here you go,” Blair said as he handed Stiles a bag of food. MRE packaged and still sealed. Neither Blair or Rodney reminded Stiles of any of the military vets he had met growing up around the sheriff’s station. They weren’t anything at all like his dad. But they seemed to be who they said they were. And they seemed like decent guys who actually had the capacity to care about the well-being of a strange kid who wandered up to them to beg for food. Now that he had the food in hand, Stiles didn’t feel suspicious that it might be drugged or poisoned.

The crazy thing was that Derek was so deep asleep at Stiles’ knees that he was snoring. Stiles sipped at the tea, something mild and sweet and herbal that probably did have caffeine in it. But Stiles felt relaxed and tired, like he was safe.

*~*~*

It took practice and a lot of getting used to, but Sheppard finally felt he had a handle on the trick Ellison had taught him. The important part was to have a steady sound to focus on as background noise, and John was all too happy to trade the sound of the creek in for the sound of another human. The headache was gradually letting up now that he could safely explore the sounds and break up the wall of static. Sheppard even chanced plodding through the cold water a few times, even though Ellison told him he’d regret it.

“It’s fine,” said John, spirits much lifted from the start of the hike. “See, ma, no zone outs.”

“I’d be more worried about the rash you’re gonna get walking around in wet socks because we aren’t stopping to let you dry off,” Jim replied. He had earned Sheppard’s attention again.

“Wait. Rash?”

Jim nodded. “You said you get cold easy now, right? Your sense of touch is dialed up, so your skin is picking up any changes in your immediate environment. Cold water? Big change. So... do the math.”

Sheppard stared down at the boots he had been so happy to get muddy. He still had trouble shaving because of the rash from the alien cuff at his neck weeks earlier. While the rash was gone enough to make Carson stop frowning every time he saw him, it still scratched and complained at any opportunity. It was like being a teenager and having to worry about angry skin every time he looked in a mirror, only now John was in his forties and it was just a single bizarre stripe around his neck. That was not allowed to happen anywhere else.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, stubbornly willing it into existence. “I’ll be fine.”

Rather than waste more time on warnings that might not be relevant, Ellison asked - again - if they were headed in the right direction. It was actually helpful because it made Sheppard mentally stop and check in with himself.

One of the exercises Ellison had given him to practice working on was to help isolate sounds, tastes, or other sensory input by assigning it an imaginary dial, and turning the knob up or down a notch as needed. The trick was to train the senses to respond to the dials. Sheppard had adjusted that idea slightly for this mission. If he was supposed to find his team, he needed a direction, so as he practiced working with the dials, he also checked in with a compass in his mind. If it wasn’t spinning in circles, he figured he was instinctively on the right track.

“Yeah. Still good,” Sheppard reported. Ellison nodded his acceptance and picked his way further up the bank to more solid ground. They walked on for another few minutes in quiet, moving at a good pace. John kept near the water, but was mindful of staying out of it.

There were a few reasons to be glad to be back on Earth, and a walk in the woods without worrying about aliens attacking, or crazy, nasty bugs were at least two of them. Sheppard still avoided the random potato bug he had seen so far, just in case, but it was overall a nice break from the norm. But he remembered being a kid, on camping trips with his grandpa, catching tadpoles in mason jars and smoking fresh caught fish over the campfire. It was a different place and time, but he was at least back on the same planet to enjoy the memories.

It was probably getting on toward three or four in the afternoon. For all Sheppard trusted himself, it had been hours since they had been dropped off and he still hadn’t come across his team. How far out where they supposed to be? Had he gone the wrong way after all?

When Sheppard turned back to check with Ellison, he found the man had stopped some fifty yards back and stood staring at the hillside, into the trees. Sheppard followed his gaze and saw a thin trail of smoke. Seeing the smoke made him realize that the smokey smell in the air wasn’t his imagination from a rogue memory he was chasing down in the forest, but it was really something in the air that he could smell. It was surprising, if not slightly unnerving how his senses had hijacked his brain. He had to watch that.

“Captain?” Sheppard called back at Ellison. The captain didn’t seem to hear him. Had he zoned? Shit. John didn’t know what to do, and the man who did was somewhere lost in the woods. Sheppard jogged back to see if he could snap the Sentinel out of a zone.

“This whole thing would have been a lot easier if I wasn’t coming in blind, you know,” Sheppard complained mildly.

Ellison looked back at him suddenly, something both a relief and a surprise. Sheppard stopped in his tracks, startled.

“You aren’t blind. You know what you’re doing,” Ellison told him. It was beginning to sound like a platitude, honestly.

“Did you just zone out?” Sheppard asked, pointing toward the trees where Jim had been focused. Jim shook his head.

“No, I’m fine. Why?”

“Because Sandburg’s not here. I don’t know what to do with a body in the woods, believe it or not.”

Ellison seemed amused and shook his head. He moved to follow after Sheppard again. “I’ve been dealing with this longer than you, remember? If there’s something out here that puts me in a zone, the smartest thing for you to do is run. Just worry about you, Colonel.”

“Right,” said Sheppard, not at all on board with that course of action. He would have to ask Sandburg about it later. For now, he would drop it. “So what’d you find?”

“Nothing interesting. Looks like someone just put out a campfire. Was checking it out is all,” Ellison told him. They started hiking again, Sheppard in the lead and uncomfortable. The compass in his head wasn’t exactly spinning, but there was a definite wobble.

“Do you know the route?” he asked. “Seems like we should have found someone by now. I’m... maybe second guessing... the whole directional orientation thing I had going.”

Ellison shook his head. “I don’t know the route. But it’s not even sundown yet. You’re not on a clock.”

“How do I know I’m not just following the river? We’ve crossed it, what, three times? I’m at least certain we aren’t going in circles, but that’s about it,” said Sheppard. Ellison didn’t seem concerned.

“Do you think we should be going another direction?” he asked. That was at least something Sheppard could answer with some degree of confidence.

“No... it’s still that way. Definitely that way,” he said, pointing vaguely.

“Then we go that way. Practice trusting your senses, Colonel. Even if it doesn’t make sense just now,” said Ellison. “If you say we follow the channel, we go that way.”

Sheppard accepted it and went back to walking. Up ahead, the water turned left and he led the way as they climbed back up the bank into the treeline, heading north west rather than turn south with the water.

*~*~*


	12. Chapter 12

The Stiles kid was pretty smart. He was quick to smart off with sarcasm, which was a scientifically proven sign of intelligence, and one that McKay was quite familiar with. He seemed like a good kid and McKay didn’t like that he had been so badly hurt, that he was so exhausted that he could fall asleep within an hour of being offered even the most basic kindness from strangers.

McKay and his team had been shown better consideration by aliens in an another galaxy than the teenager who had wandered into their camp had been shown by whoever had been taking care of him since his dad had died. Stiles didn’t seem at all prepared for the world he was stuck in if he had resorted to wandering the woods rather than risk going to wherever home was supposed to be.

McKay and Sandburg kept quiet as Stiles snored next to the wolf, the both of them sprawled out on the emergency kit blanket Sandburg had given the kid. He slept for probably a half an hour before something startled him awake, a shout coming from the boy before he sat up. Stiles blinked over at Sandburg and then noted where McKay was before getting carefully to his feet. He moved like he hurt, but then, waking up off the ground wasn’t easy to bounce up from, Rodney knew.

“Be right back,” the kid announced, keeping his eyes down. It just wasn’t right. McKay waved half heartedly and made sure the kid walked away without tripping on his face before he looked over at Blair.

“Do you think the kid’ll be okay?” he asked, trying to be quiet. Blair noted where Stiles had wandered off, too, and after a moment nodded. He didn’t seem his usual level of cheerful.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine... eventually.”

McKay frowned at the frustrating answer. “I mean today. Tomorrow. He seems like an okay kid. We can’t just leave him in the woods.”

Taking a drink from his canteen, Blair shrugged. “I’m sure he’ll feel a lot better about life if you use his actual name instead of ‘kid’ all the time...”

“I’m bad with names, okay? Ask anybody. That’s not my point,” said Rodney, frustrated at what he knew was probably a valid point even if it wasn’t the one Rodney was getting at. Blair nodded and waved a hand to signal for McKay to calm down. He paused and put a little more thought into a real reply before he tried again.

“Look, it sucks,” Blair agreed, careful in his tone. “But someone has to be looking out for him. He’s a sheriff’s kid, you know? Law enforcement is a pretty tight knit community. It’s a ... modern village.”

McKay pointed vaguely toward where Blair had told him Beacon Hills would be found. “And somebody in that village put the kid through a shredder and then kicked him out into the woods. He’s not safe.”

“I’m with you there, Rodney. But there’s not much we can do about it. He didn’t ask for help. We can’t exactly take him with us.”

“Why not?” McKay asked, bluntly surprised by the concept. It hadn’t actually occurred to him as a possibility until Sandburg had said it wasn’t one. It made a lot of sense to Rodney though suddenly. A lot more than just leaving a kid to get beat up by a foster family.

Blair looked at him, blinking as he tried to catch up with the logic. “Excuse me?”

McKay pointed back over his shoulder toward where Stiles had wandered off. “Why not take him with us? We do it all the time. Teyla is always asking us to... re-home strays.”

Blair shifted slightly where he sat, turning to face Rodney more directly to be sure he was being understood. Plus Sandburg talked with his hands a lot and it tended to work better to yell at people with both hands instead of just the one on the side they could see. “Okay... let me clarify... that’s not how it’s done here on Earth. There’s a process. A system. And it sucks. But Stiles is already in that system. We can’t just... _take him_ from it. So unless you’re making a pretty drastic career change, man...”

“Are you kidding me? I am not good with kids. At all.” McKay shook his head at what was definitely a dumb idea.

Blair watched him carefully, eyes narrowed for a moment. He finally seemed to relax and nodded his head. “Right. So then maybe when the kid says he’s okay, we should listen, and hope he means it.”

McKay couldn’t dismiss it that easily. “He’s not though. I’m just saying.”

Rather than go another round on the topic, Blair reached over and tapped another MRE against Rodney’s arm. He had apparently figured out that McKay could be easily bought off with offerings of food. McKay felt disinclined to argue and investigated the food contents.

Seconds later he heard a ‘ _Snap_!’ from the woods ahead of them, coming from the opposite direction from where Stiles had disappeared. The wolf who had been happily dozing across the fire pit from Blair and Rodney sat up, ears perked and swiveling toward the noise. Rodney startled as the wolf growled and stood up. It moved toward them even while it watched the trees around them.

“Ac- why didn’t he go with Stiles?” Rodney muttered. The wolf reacting to the noise wasn’t making him feel any better about being on a mission without Ronon and Sheppard or any other way of defending himself. Except maybe a stick in the fire, and that was obviously Rodney’s last choice of resources.

“When’s the last time you voluntarily took your dog to go find a bathroom in the woods,” replied Sandburg quietly. He wasn’t ignoring the noise, either, but he was very intentionally downplaying it.

“I have a cat. A fat one. I just close the door,” said Rodney. Blair nodded.

“And now you know why Derek stayed with us.”

“I still heard something. Crap. Was it Sheppard? Don’t kill Sheppard, okay, wo- Derek? John's the good guy.” Rodney stood up, food forgotten as he decided to go look for his team. The sun was on the way down but it wouldn’t be dark for another few hours yet, and maybe the others were close.

“Sheppard?” he called out, dusting himself off. Sandburg stood up too. The wolf, however, snapped toothy jaws at them to keep them from moving anywhere, keeping them herded behind him.

“Hey!” yelped McKay.

The wolf continued to growl, but he had turned his back on McKay and Sandburg, instead intent on the trees toward the darker sky as the sun sank lower in the west. That wasn’t a good sign.

“Where’s Stiles?” asked Sandburg. “Stiles!”

Suddenly there was a sickening noise just in front of them, one McKay knew well enough. The wolf let out something that sounded more like an angry roar than anything a dog would ever make. He took a few steps before he fell over, allowing McKay to see the arrow lodged in the front of the wolf’s chest, embedded just at the shoulder.

“Arrows! Oh god. Not arrows. Not here, too.”

“What- Derek? Shit shit shit...” Blair moved a step toward the wolf but it thrashed and shoved itself to four paws again. Sandburg jumped back and McKay grabbed his arm to keep him from doing anything so stupid again.

“Stiles!” they both shouted at once.

Another arrow ricocheted off the rocks near the fire.

“Who’s idea was it to go on a mission without guns?” McKay demanded, falling back to duck behind a tree. Blair tried again to get to the wolf, got to kneel next to him, and then got shot at for the effort. He fell back as an arrow grazed his arm and cut the black sleeve of his t-shirt.

“Back off!” The order came from a voice that definitely did not belong to Sheppard or Stiles, either one. McKay saw a shadow dressed in hunting camouflage step out from the trees, carrying what looked like a crossbow. Another stranger showed up from the flare of the sunset, a good, old fashioned gun in hand. Oh _great_.

Two more showed up from the north, behind McKay, to shove him away from the tree and toward the fire. Another one dragged Stiles into view. The kid had a new black eye and Rodney took further offense to the group of strangers’ existence.

“Hey! Knock it off!” he tried, but it was mostly ignored.

“You’re Stiles?” the man with the crossbow asked of their new friend. When the teen confirmed it with a nod, he was let go. Stiles instantly collected the blanket he had been napping on earlier and moved to drape it over the wolf, checking on the wound around the arrow bolt. Blair had taken a knee and, like McKay, watched everyone while keeping his hands harmlessly in the air and in easy sight. His arm was bleeding, which made McKay more nervous about the entire situation.

“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here,” Blair began, trying to play peacekeeper. “But our team is on the way here and-”

“Team?” asked one of the armed strangers. “That’s what they’re trying to call it now? Don’t you mean a _pack_?”

“Call it what you want,” Interrupted Rodney. “But the _point_ is, our guys are better armed, so now you’ve had your fun, you should leave before things get ugly.”

“I’m sure they’ll get real ugly,” returned the one with the crossbow. He aimed it at him and Rodney had to have a rethink on the effectiveness of his tactics. This wasn’t his arena. This was why he only went places with a team.

“Hey! Shit for brains! They’re human, okay?” Stiles made the declaration with a fully rational confidence and genuine anger, no matter how confused it left McKay. “And you just shot their dog. So before you make this any worse than it already is, get Chris Argent on the phone. He can come sort this out. He’s looking for me.”

“Yeah, we know he is. And he’s looking for the werewolf pack that took you, too,” said the one with the gun. “So don’t try to tell us that’s their damn _dog_.”

“What the hell are you even talking about?” Sandburg asked.

“Don’t play dumb,” came the annoyed reply from the angry stranger.

Stiles still tried to help his dog but he glared up at the strangers. “They’re not playing! I told you!”

“Dumb? You’re talking about werewolves and you’re calling us _dumb_?” Rodney said, talking over Stiles’ mild insult. “You _shot_ at us! And _you’re_ mad about _werewolves_?”

“I can shoot you and we’ll find out,” the stranger challenged.

“How do you figure that’ll prove anything at all?” returned McKay. The man obviously had no grasp of how scientific proof worked, either.

Blair was getting frustrated, too. “Rodney! Stop-”

“No! I don’t like getting shot at! Arrows hurt. A lot. They are _not_ toys. And anyone raving about werewolves is not mentally competent to be handling weapons.” McKay was only just getting started. “I have personally worked on dozens of genetic coding modules in my career and I can confidently guarantee you, with my word as a mathematician and a scientist, that humans changing their physical form to that of any other animal - let alone a quadruped - and then shifting back at will is an actual scientific impossibility. Every simulation _failed_. The human genome isn’t capable of it.”

“That’s right. Because the monsters aren’t human,” came the snide answer from the dumb hick hiding behind the gun.

“Yes, they are!” countered Stiles angrily. “Now call Argent, and let them go. They aren’t who you think.”

The kid could pull an authoritative tone when he wanted to, but the men with the weapons didn’t seem inclined to care.

“No. Now, you get away from the wolf,” ordered the man with the crossbow. Sandburg got cautiously to his feet, offered to help Stiles, but Stiles wasn’t going to move. As he started to show signs of resisting the order, Sandburg was hauled away from him by two strangers. Another two grabbed Rodney and shoved him to his knees.

“Oh come on...” McKay complained. This was not how life was supposed to go back on Earth, too. He felt cold metal click on his wrist and startled. “Where the hell did you idiots get handcuffs?”

“Pretty sure you are not helping, Rodney,” Sandburg hissed at him as he was shoved to his knees beside him.

“Did you miss the memo that I’m kinda pissed off?” McKay replied. “Every time this shit happens, I’m in the infirmary for days. _Days_.”

Whatever stalling complaints Rodney had lined up to buy time for his team to show up and save the day with suddenly disappeared. The blanket-wrapped wolf next to Stiles started convulsing, at first small tremors working up to a full seizure. Stiles put hands on the wolf again, bracing in a misguided effort to hold it still.

“No, no, no... don’t do this...” Stiles muttered.

The wolf under the blanket inexplicably started to glow, first white and then blue, and back to a blinding white. And just like that, the wolf was gone. In its place was another young man, under the blanket, with Stiles’ hands now on his very naked chest, flat around an arrow wound to his right shoulder. All through the area around the arrow, blue and purple lines wove under the skin, like poisoned veins. Stiles did not look nearly as surprised as Rodney felt. The teen looked up at Crossbow Man.

“The arrows- There’s aconite on the arrows, too?” he asked, sounding more angry than anything else.

“Of course. Works great, so why the hell not?” came the reply.

Stiles wasn’t a very big kid. He was taller than he was coordinated really, and he wasn’t all that tall compared to, say, Ronon or Sheppard. But he was angry. The teenager launched himself toward the man with the crossbow, kicking ash from the fire pit edge at him and just barely avoiding the flames. The kid was pretty scrappy. But he was still a kid. And he was already pretty beat up.

When one of the strangers took an electrified cattle prod to Stiles’ side to get him to back off, the teen went down like a rock.

McKay could only stare in stupefied shock. Reality as he knew it just shifted, and hard. And it was probably about to hit him in the face, too.

“Oh boy.”

*~*~*


	13. Chapter 13

The next time Sheppard stopped and checked in with Ellison, it wasn’t because of a wobbly compass. The sun was on its way down and John knew it would be getting dark in a few hours, but even with the shadows in the trees, he could see fine. He took his sunglasses off his face so he could look around more clearly, trying to settle the anxious feeling that had attacked his spine like needles. Something was bugging him.

“Look... this is going to sound really, _really_ stupid,” Sheppard began. Even the plastic wrap over his palm was bothering him again and he scratched at it in a vain effort to stop the new distractions.

“Probably not,” replied Ellison. The collected calm the man had shown over the day since they had been dropped off wasn’t there now. He was finally showing outward signs of feeling the pressure of the non-existent clock that had been ticking on Sheppard all day long. “Try me.”

“Okay... does this instinct _thing_ come with the feeling like somebody just pulled the fire alarm? Because I’m pretty sure there’s a problem and we just haven’t found it yet,” Sheppard said. Ellison grimaced, which Sheppard noticed happened when he asked the hard questions that didn’t have a military-approved answer. “So that’s a _yes_ , then...” said Sheppard.

“Kinda,” said Ellison. “We gotta rule out something first.”

“What?”

“You’ve been looking forward this whole time,” Ellison began. “Which is fine. I’m on the six. But it does mean you missed something. So it might be that you’re just now picking up on them.”

Sheppard didn’t like the sound of that. He looked around, turning to face Ellison more directly and check the creek channel behind them. “What, then?”

Jim turned and waved to the trees to Sheppard’s left.

“Teyla! Ronon!” he called out, not very loudly but enough to carry. Sheppard turned to see his team step out onto the banks of the creek bed to start toward them.

“What the hell-”

“Yeah. You were close, you walked us right up to them, but then you changed directions,” said Ellison.

Well... that didn't sound like a _passing_ grade.

“Do you think that fire-alarm feeling is them?” asked Jim.

Sheppard considered it but shook his head. “No. This... this is something _wrong_ ,” he said.

Ellison nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I got that.”

“So trust it?” Sheppard asked. Again, a reluctant nod from the Sentinel.

“Trust it.”

Sheppard looked to Teyla and Ronon, glad to see them safe at least, even if they had succeeded in winning the game that was supposed to have been a test for him. One he had obviously failed.

“So where were you two hiding?” he asked, loud enough for them to hear even though they weren’t quite conversationally close. Ronon pointed back over his shoulder into the trees.

“Probably about two miles back,” he reported. He seemed calm and relaxed, not at all on alert. “I caught some fish for lunch. S’alright here. Good eats.”

Teyla nodded as she approached. “Captain Ellison saw us. When you didn’t approach, we assumed we were to follow. We doused the fire and have kept up.”

John looked at Ellison, squinting and mildly annoyed. “Really? Back _there_? You said it was _nothing_.”

Jim shrugged. “Needed to see if you’d notice them. This time, you’re green, so it’s fine. Any other test? They got the drop on you. Bang, you’re dead, game over, boss.”

“So much for sharpened instinct, huh?” Sheppard said. He was annoyed with himself. Even now, facing two of his missing team, he still had a mental compass pointing very clearly away from them. Sheppard looked to the Sentinel. “So how do we know if we’re even going the right direction now? If I walked away from them-”

“What’s your gut say?” Ellison interrupted.

John turned to point the way he had been hiking before he got hit by the bad vibes. “My gut says what it’s been saying. That McKay is out there, that way. I figured that’s where everyone was.”

There was a moment of quiet, aside from the sounds of the forest, the creek, and Teyla jumping up onto a rock near Sheppard. She looked over at him curiously.

“Why are you looking for Rodney, John?” she asked in her usual, unassuming way. Sheppard hadn’t been expecting the question and he blinked, trying to sort that one out for himself. He had no answers.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “All I got is he’s _that_ way.”

Ellison nodded and reached out to steer Sheppard back to their original path. “So’s Sandburg. So let’s go, _please_.”

The man wasn’t in a patient mood anymore and the _please_ was only tacked on because he was new to the team and John outranked him. But Sheppard didn’t mind. He felt himself getting cranky again, this time because something was wrong and not because of a headache.

The newly formed team hadn’t gone five yards before a gunshot rang out. It was still some distance away, but the sound of it echoing along the open creek bed nearly sent Sheppard to his knees. Ellison grabbed him by the arm and the back of the belt to get him standing and keep them all moving.

“Dial it back,” he said, quiet, even as he pushed Sheppard to run. “Keep the sound down and your eyes open.”

They were probably running toward the trouble that Sheppard had asked about, but he had to trust Ellison’s senses on it because Sheppard’s hearing wouldn’t level out after the gunshot. He saw Ronon darting ahead, the particle magnum in hand.

“Ronon! Stun!” he ordered, trying to keep his voice quiet. The man glanced back at him and Sheppard pointed at the gun.

“No way-”

“Ronon!” Sheppard tried to put as much authority into it as he could, considering he was the only one on the team currently without a weapon at all. “ _Earth_! Stun.”

Ronon didn’t approve, but he complied. It was unnerving to hear the gun switch modes, the alien tech making a high pitched, warped sound. Sheppard rubbed at his ears, trying to get them to cooperate again. He nearly tripped when he thought he heard McKay’s voice.

“ _Okay! Just don’t shoot at anybody again!_ ”

“ _No, you’re next,_ ” came another voice, one Sheppard didn’t recognize through the distortion of noise he was hearing. They were still far away behind a lot of static. Trying to listen slowed Sheppard down, but he was trying to shift course to find them through the sounds he could hear.

“ _Damnit. Did he heal yet?_ ” Sheppard heard another unknown voice ask.

“ _No! He did not!_ ” yelped McKay.

“ _This is not how people heal!_ ” added what sounded like Blair Sandburg’s voice.

“ _So we go bigger this time-_ ”

There was a clatter of rocks nearby and Sheppard wasn’t expecting it, crashing his hearing again just as effectively as the gunshot. He looked to Ellison, saw him racing Ronon to lead the way out of the channel into the forest again. Teyla was working with the radio, paging Carter to send the helicopter.

“Tell Carter we’re gonna need Carson,” Sheppard said as he caught up to her. “They’re gonna have to come in hot. On our transmitters. We’ve got injured.”

*~*~*

Sheppard was a little off his game because his ears were ringing so badly, but he was able to keep up with Ellison. Teyla and Ronon had trouble as the forest floor got darker, which slowed them down. Ellison led the way around the higher side before approaching the day-camp. He stayed hidden behind denser tree cover rather than approach from the open and noisy creekside with the loose rocks and water.

Ellison and Sheppard stood behind an outcrop of rock off the hillside that was half covered in ivy and twisted mangrove. They could see clearly, but Ronon wanted to get closer to assess for himself. Sheppard caught him by the arm before he could get far.

“You have your knife, right?” he asked, hardly a whisper.

“Yeah.” Ronon held it up.

“Use it. Let me use the other,” said Sheppard, pointing to the gun. Ronon looked back at him, annoyed.

“Where’s yours?”

“Probably still sitting on Weir’s desk.”

The big Satedan hesitated, annoyance fading. He almost looked concerned. “This a Sentinel thing? Maybe me and Teyla should take this-”

“No. I can handle the that one. We’re wasting time,” Sheppard replied. Ronon didn’t look so sure. He even glanced at Ellison as if to confirm it. Sheppard stood a little taller. “I’ll make it an order,” he warned. Ronon handed over the weapon.

“No comas,” he said, a threat of his own built in to his tone. Sheppard nodded and turned to take aim on the camp through the trees. He couldn’t take the time to explain it to his team, but Sheppard wanted the alien magnum because he figured it was the safer option after the gunshots earlier. He had tried the dial trick but he didn’t have enough practice with it yet. He'd have to fake it, but he wouldn’t go in unarmed.

Next to him, Ellison was trying to line up a shot over the top of the rock. If they got much closer as a group, they could risk being seen, and with Sandburg and McKay on the ground near the fire, any approach would be reliant on surprise.

“Two bodies on the ground,” Ellison reported, still quiet. “Our guys are still breathing.”

“And complaining,” added Sheppard, for once glad to hear Rodney McKay rambling about inhumane conditions. He moved enough to get a better sightline on one of the men in hunters’ camo threatening his team. He could see four men easily, and saw the shadows of movement from two others.

“Looks like six threats. Should be a cakewalk, right, guys?” he asked Ronon and Teyla. Ronon nodded, accepting that as his mark to get ready. He stalked wide to the left while Teyla mirrored him off to the right, creeping like a cat along the uneven terrain to stay behind the cover of the summer-dried birches and bare pines.

Sheppard’s hearing easily picked up voices from the camp again, way too loud. He hoped that meant even Ronon and Teyla could hear, but he wasn’t certain.

“Still bleeding,” came a report from one of the men lurking around McKay.

“Still _human_!” McKay returned. He sounded angry and Sheppard figured that was a good sign.

“Either way, it’s annoying,” said the obvious bad guy with the gun. He raised the weapon, either to hit Rodney with it or shoot him, but Sheppard didn’t care to find out which. He adjusted the borrowed weapon just enough and fired, once on stun and then a second blast that would be more effective. The hunter he was aiming for convulsed from the first shot and the second sent him tumbling into the fire pit.

“Make that five threats,” he announced. Ronon and Teyla took that as their sign to move and Sheppard pulled at Ellison to urge him from their cover while the men at the fire pit were distracted. They had a chance to take care of things from up close and they were going to use every second.

The hunter dampened the fire when he fell on it, just for a moment. Sandburg and McKay scrambled out of the way, unsteady getting to their feet thanks to their arms locked behind their backs. Two of the hunters tried to haul their man off the fire while the others fired random shots into the trees around them.

Sheppard got off another stun shot and watched his target fall. A man with a crossbow went down and Sheppard looked over to see Ellison advancing with his weapon aimed and freshly fired. He could see the heat smoke and smell the proof of it, but he couldn’t hear a damn thing. It didn’t bother him, especially when he saw the flash of Teyla’s weapon. John didn’t need the noise overload so he would deal with the silence when they were out of the situation.

The two men who had pulled the body from the fire pit and beat down the flames from their compatriot’s clothes were surprised shortly thereafter by a sneak attack from Ronon while they were distracted. He slashed with the knife and dumped them over his shoulder. Sheppard guessed the men had both suffered their ACL’s being sliced as Ronon neutralized the threat without killing them. He was mildly pleased to know that Ronon had a ‘stun’ setting available without the gun, but it still meant a whole bunch of problems on the paperwork side. It was still nice when the man remembered an order.

Sheppard and Teyla pulled weapons away from dead and not-so-dead bodies as Ronon moved them all to one place. Ellison saw to Sandburg and McKay. The only two dead hunters had been dispatched by Sheppard and Ellison. Teyla and Ronon thankfully weren’t as willing to break laws on Earth soil. Sheppard wasn’t yet sure how to explain to Carter and O’Neill that a simple day of hiking with the new team had still resulted in a war-zone. Carson was definitely gonna kill him. Especially since John still couldn’t hear what any of his team was saying to each other.

Once he had the four bad guys locked up and harmless, Ronon went to check on the two bodies that weren’t Sheppard’s team’s fault. That’s when the entire silent-movie experience of the fight was shattered.

“Leave them there,” shouted Rodney. “They’re alive! Good guys!”

Sheppard ducked and tried to hide his ears under his arms. “Jesus, McKay! Don’t yell!”

Ellison got McKay out of the handcuffs, shaking his head at Sheppard for it. “Check the dials, boss.”

Blair Sandburg moved to set a hand on Sheppard’s arm. “He wasn’t yelling. Try tuning out the sounds for a minute.”

John at least heard Sandburg, even though he was being quiet, and they didn’t exactly have a lot of time to spend on his whacked out senses, so Sheppard didn’t argue with the coaching. He tried to listen for the nearest heartbeat, quiet and close sounds to pick out of the static. He assumed it would be Sandburg’s, but the one he found was loud and way too fast. After that, the other sounds around him came back into clearer focus.

Hearing the four surviving bad guys sniveling and shouting empty threats at Ronon as he babysat them was probably worth the effort.

Sheppard looked to Sandburg and then over at McKay, who despite a worrying slice of red across his own forehead was crouched to check one of the good guys for vitals.

“They’re alive, Rodney,” Sheppard told him. “I can hear them.”

“Yeah, well, you just snapped my head off for _talking_ , so you don’t get to _show off_ now,” replied Rodney. He stood up and pointed to the teenagers still passed out on the ground. “We gotta get them to Carson. They’re just kids.”

“Chopper’s not far out,” Ellison reported. Sheppard nodded; he could hear it, too, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it.

“What about you two?” Sheppard asked, looking between Rodney and Blair. Both of them were bloody if not bleeding. Rodney nodded.

“Shot at. Hit. Also, there may or may not have been werewolves.”

The man was rattled. Sheppard realized suddenly that it was McKay who he was listening to in the background to keep his senses level because the heartbeat tripped on the word ‘ _werewolves_.’

“Okay... we’re gonna have Carson check you over, too...”

Ellison handed Sandburg his own recently fired weapon. “What the hell happened here, Chief?” he asked. Sandburg still seemed pretty solid as he tucked the weapon in his thigh-holster without question. He wasn’t shaky, pointed easily toward the men Ronon and Ellison had handcuffed around the tree across from the disarrayed fire pit.

“These guys showed up, chasing the kids. Basically. I... really don’t know how to explain any of it,” he said. For all he wasn’t in a panic like Rodney, Sandburg still wasn’t okay. Something had happened. And they didn’t have time to get answers.

Teyla stood near Rodney with her silent, calming presence, like she was willing him to feel better. She had collected three black backpacks from around the site and handed the two men canteens. She dug blindly into one of the packs and came out with a box of PopTarts. She didn’t know what to do with it, but she handed it to McKay. “I think these are edible.”

Rodney pounced on the box with blood-coated hands. Some fifty yards away, the Black Hawk was coming in to land in the wide creekbed, well away from the trees. Sandburg looked from the helicopter to Sheppard, pointed at the obvious weapon in his hand.

“You should probably give that back,” he said, voice pitched loud over the noise. “Regulations.”

Sheppard stared, surprised. He huffed out a humorless laugh as he glanced at the two dead bodies sprawled under the trees not far away.

“ _Regulations_ are the least of my worries now,” he replied, hefting the gun up to hold it across the barrel. He still handed it over to Ronon, just to make Ellison and Sandburg feel better. “This mess puts me at a whole new level of fucked when the General hears about it.”

And it was true. Test mission or not, Sheppard was the ranking officer. He was the whole reason they were out there in the first place. Two members of his team had been attacked on his watch, along with two random American citizens killed by active military personnel, on American soil. Bad guys from _Deliverance_ notwithstanding, Sheppard wouldn’t just be thrown under a bus; they’d probably find a steamroller just to keep the SGC and the Sentinel Project out of trouble.

McKay seemed to get shocked out of his panic-mode and stared at Sheppard, probably trying to argue and running into the wall of their shared experiences working with the SGC through Caldwell and Woolsey. Sheppard shrugged it off; they got away with a lot in Pegasus that wasn’t going to fly on Earth and there wasn’t much to be done about it now.

“Look, for now? You two and Ronon get those kids out to Carson. Keep Carter in the chopper. I’ll... figure the rest out later,” Sheppard ordered, just short of yelling to be sure everyone heard him over the noise kicked up by the wind from the helicopter idling in the narrow valley.

Blair looked from Sheppard to Ellison and then to McKay. He convinced McKay to help with the one kid who was slowly starting to show signs of awareness. The other one had an arrow in his shoulder and was out solid, so Sandburg wrapped him up in the blanket a little more securely before Ronon picked him up and carried him.

Teyla was giving John the suspicious eye, whatever sixth sense she had already well at work questioning his life-choices in the moment, but she waited beside him as Sheppard tried to sort out how to handle the extras.

The men had attacked Blair and Rodney, there was no question, and Sheppard didn’t know the details. He and Ellison had acted in defense of their team. It wasn’t a guaranteed court martial when he got back, but it was months in the wrong direction, moving Sheppard and his team further away from going back to Atlantis. It meant opening up uncomfortable trouble since two members of his team weren’t exactly _local_. And John didn’t have the first idea what the Sentinel protocols would do, considering he and Ellison weren’t supposed to be carrying weapons at all.

“Shit,” Sheppard muttered, staring at the four men left as witnesses. It was John’s show, but this mess... he didn’t know what to do with it.

Suddenly Ellison caught his attention by tugging at his vest until Sheppard faced him.

“Back me up on this,” the Sentinel said, voice quiet enough that Teyla probably couldn’t have heard him over the noise. It wasn’t an order, but the man had decided on whatever it was. Ellison was pretty straight-laced and by the book - which Sheppard wasn’t - so John nodded his promise. When Ellison went over to the men handcuffed together around the tree, Sheppard followed to stay in earshot.

“You, gentleman, just fucked up,” Ellison said, speaking louder than the noise from the creek.

“Fuck you!” barked one of the two men Ronon had left permanently benched with a cut of his knife. At least Ronon had been thoughtful enough to tie up the wounds to keep pressure on so they didn’t bleed out, which Sheppard thought was more than kind of him.

“No, fuck you,” returned Ellison, grabbing the man by the shirt. “You went after somebody under _our_ protection. And it’s not gonna happen again, got it? Whoever you’re working for, tell ‘em to back off. They don’t want to fuck around with the Sunrise Patriots. Is that understood, soldier?”

The very direct threat seemed to have the intended effect and the injured man nodded. Ellison held up the handcuff key and made sure the man saw it when he dropped it on the ground where, with a little coordinated effort, the men could retrieve it. Then he stood up, paced over to pick up a cell phone from the stack of weapons that had been removed from the men. He walked back and crouched beside him again to put it in the man’s pocket.

“We ever see any of your kind again, you’re dead,” he said, completing the threat with a smile. Then Ellison stood up, helped himself to two of the handguns from the pile of weapons, and moved to meet Sheppard.

John had promised to back the play, so he watched the captain threaten the trio with his best poker-face in place. When Ellison handed him one of the weapons, he accepted it and backed away from the group to follow the Sentinel. Teyla matched their steps, watching over them as the only one technically even allowed to carry a gun.

When they cleared the treeline and were closer to the chopper, Sheppard waved for Teyla to keep watch at their backs. He pulled Ellison short of their ride out.

“I _said_ I’ll back you. But what the _hell_ did I just agree to?” he asked, loud enough for a Sentinel but not loud enough to carry over the noise of the helicopter rotors.

“They took our men. We were unarmed and we still got them back,” said Ellison. “That’s the only line the Project regulations will allow. Short of a court martial, anyway, and those look a lot _different_ with that tattoo on your hand.”

“And the bad guys just get away?” Sheppard asked.

“Probably thinking they got lucky,” Ellison confirmed. “They’ll know who the Patriots are. They won’t want to bring _that_ hell down on their heads.”

Sheppard wasn’t easy with it. But he would consider it. In the meantime, he called Teyla in and ushered the last members of his team onto the waiting Black Hawk. Sheppard closed them in and the helicopter pulled into the air.

Inside, Carter moved to where she could check over Sheppard and Ellison as Teyla climbed back to help Carson with their injured guests. Sandburg and Ellison were secured in their seats and mic’d up already. McKay crowded in next to Sheppard, holding a towel against the side of his face. The man didn’t even bother with a helmet in a helicopter so he obviously wasn’t normal if he was passing on an available safety precaution.

“What the hell happened?” Carter asked, concerned. “McKay won’t even open his mouth to talk to me.”

Sheppard blinked at her, surprised. He hadn’t heard that right. McKay didn’t even look up so Sheppard guessed _he_ hadn’t heard her at all. He took the headphone comm set Carter handed him and then asked her to repeat herself. He still didn’t have an answer for her.

“I don’t know. By the time we caught up, they’d already found trouble,” John said, sticking to the truth. _Kinda_. “When Ronon chased them off, McKay said the kids needed help, and they looked pretty bad off.”

“They are. Stiles said the arrows were poisoned,” McKay said loudly, responding to Sheppard probably only because he could hear him, sitting next to him. He looked miserable, holding a rag up to his head like an ice pack on a headache. There was blood on his hand and he wasn’t even freaking out. Sheppard caught himself listening to check if the man’s heart rate had settled down. He seemed pretty steady now, just tired.

Carter sank into her seat, looking stunned at McKay, her stubborn friend who was suddenly capable of speech again. She looked to Sandburg and Ellison.

“Is this how these things usually go for you?” she asked. Sandburg shook his head as Ellison investigated a gash across the man’s bicep.

“No. We’ve never _needed_ to be armed before,” he replied. “It’s a ninety-two percent success rate, and we’ve done this hundreds of times, easy. No trouble.”

“That figures,” Carter said, quiet. Sheppard cut her a glare for the commentary, even if it was true.

“Well, aside from the mountain of paperwork Sheppard’s going to have, it at least didn’t screw with _our_ stats, Chief,” Ellison said to Sandburg. His voice was pitched quiet over the shared comm system. Blair looked over at him, curious.

“What?” he asked. He jerked his arm involuntarily with an ‘Ow!’ and Ellison stopped trying to clean the wound. He held the rag over the cut and Sandburg took over the chore of applying pressure.

“He was looking for McKay,” Ellison replied. “Found Teyla and Ronon but kept going.”

“Hey!” Sheppard interrupted. “For the record, that’s not my fault. Ellison told me there was nothing there. But I did _technically_ find them.”

“What took you so long?” McKay actually shoved at him, still scowling around the cleaning rag that was not being used to wipe away blood. He wasn’t bleeding out, but it was still unusual for McKay to be so calm about a head injury of any kind.

“God, you’re such a baby,” replied Sheppard. Still, his friend was having trouble with _life_ just then, so there was no heat to it. With Carson busy, Sheppard figured he could try to help, and offered to take the few first aid supplies from McKay.

There was a distrustful pause before McKay handed over the alcohol wipes and the towel. “I’m the one who was shot at by actual bullets while you were off fishing, or whatever.”

“You weren’t shot, Rodney,” said Sheppard. He could see the cut on the side of McKay’s forehead and knew for a fact that the man had lived through worse. McKay poked a finger at his head around John’s clean-up efforts.

“Well, I didn’t cut myself _shaving_ this morning, John,” returned McKay with every ounce of sarcasm he could put into it. Sheppard didn’t feel all that bad for the sting caused by the alcohol wipe he took to Rodney’s wound then.

“Oh my god,” said Sandburg’s voice over the comms. “Carson was right.”

“Yep,” replied Ellison. The worrying thing was that Sam Carter echoed him. Sheppard decided that, for the moment, he was going to ignore them.

*~*~*

Rodney was, in the common vernacular, a grown-ass adult. He was a scientist, mathematician, astrophysicist, and plain old physicist, with extra certifications in theoretical computer sciences, artificial intelligence systems, computational sciences, and engineering. He had dealt with aliens more times than he had bothered to count, which was saying something in light of the fact that McKay knew almost exactly how much radiation he had been exposed to during his lifetime. He had been attacked, injured, infected, trapped, kidnapped, mind-fucked, and nearly killed more times than he ever wanted to keep track of since joining the SGC and exploring the universe.

But the weird shit always happened somewhere else. He knew what to do with aliens and nanoghosts because that was his job. That was science. All of those bizarre things that happened ultimately had a scientific reason, and his job was - at least, partly - to keep those reasons away from Earth. The place he was born, the place he grew up, that taught him his skills and honed his brilliant genius brain, that promised him an eventual Nobel for the life-saving, mind-blowing work he did... That place was supposed to stay _normal_ , reliable, safe, and boring.

And that place had werewolves.  
Rodney could not explain werewolves.  
Nobody could explain werewolves.

But there was at least one and he was at the back of the helicopter on life support because apparently werewolves _weren’t_ immortal.

Rodney knew he should tell Carson to watch out for the wolf fangs but he was... stuck. There was a circular argument going on his brain, distracting him from his own injury, about how to even say the words and have anyone with a rational, thinking brain believe him. He was a smart man, and the fact that he couldn’t find an intelligent way to warn about a mythical monster in their midst was as frustrating as it was insulting.

And it was just a kid, too. Maybe twenty? Twenty one? Did werewolves age?

In response to the internal confusion, Rodney didn’t say anything, except when Sheppard said something to him. He had tried to tell Sheppard, too, but he didn’t believe him, because werewolves weren’t Wraith. So McKay would take the help from his friend because basic... _adulting_ wasn’t a priority. It was Sheppard’s fault anyway, so it was fair. And John Sheppard was a comforting, familiar presence. Which in itself was weird but at least made sense.

“Hold that there,” Sheppard instructed, taking Rodney’s hand to close it over the towel against his forehead. He stayed leaned in so Rodney could hear him. “I’m not a doctor, but you’re gonna need something to keep your brain from falling out.”

Rodney mechanically did as he was told, nodded a little. Then squinted in confusion at the man when his words fully processed through McKay’s brain. He lowered the towel.

“Wait - what now?”

John moved his hand back in place over the gash in his forehead.

“Just checking you’re still in there somewhere,” he said. “Apply pressure until they can look you over at the base. You’ll be fine.”

“I think I’m hungry,” McKay realized, quiet because he was still sorting it out along with everything else. Sheppard heard him anyway and scoffed, amused. He reached over to brush at Rodney’s shirt.

“You’re still wearing the crumbs from the PopTarts five minutes ago,” John told him.

“It’s been a long day,” McKay replied. “PopTarts don’t go very far.”

“We’re almost back to base. You go with Carson, I’ll find you dinner,” Sheppard promised. Rodney accepted it for a moment but then worried about werewolves again and squinted over at John.

“Why are you being nice again?”

“I’m always nice. And _now_ I’m _offended_ , Rodney,”

Rodney glared at him from around the neatly folded towel partly blocking one narrowed eye. Sheppard sighed and shrugged it off. He took his headset off, toyed with the headphones as an excuse to look down.

“Fine. I’m being nice because you got dragged into helping, and you got hurt for it. And I can literally see and smell the blood, so I can’t be the jerk who tells you to stop faking it. You’re not. And I’m sorry,” said Sheppard, loud enough for McKay to hear because he was crammed in next to him.

“They were going after Stiles, not you, for once,” McKay reasoned as a truce.

“What’s a Stiles?” Sheppard asked. McKay leaned into his shoulder to point at the boy now awake and arguing with Carson about how to treat the patient still unconscious at the back of the chopper. Rodney didn’t have a helmet or communication system on, so he couldn’t understand what they were saying, but he could see that the younger teen was very adamantly disapproving of Carson.

“Werewolves,” he muttered.

“Fine. _Werewolves_ is why I’m being nice again then,” said Sheppard. He made Rodney shift back a little, took the cloth off his forehead to check the wound again. McKay huffed, annoyed, but allowed it. Then Sheppard frowned as he dabbed at Rodney’s head with another alcohol wipe.

“Hey... Ellison?” Sheppard called to the front bench. The Sentinel was already watching them. Sheppard pointed at Blair and then tossed a couple of the steri-pak alcohol wipes over to them. “Check his arm again.”

Ellison grew slightly grim and started to once again prod at Blair’s arm, cleaning away dried blood and probably just angering the injury further, because when the hell did Sheppard become a medic who could just attack people with things that stung, anyway?

“What is it?” McKay asked.

“Checking something,” Sheppard said, leaning close again to be sure McKay heard him. He placed the folded towel back on McKay’s forehead. McKay swatted him without much effort, annoyed at being left out of a very important loop.

“Checking what?” he insisted.

“Damn,” said Ellison. McKay only just barely caught it as he was otherwise occupied trying to get Sheppard to stop ignoring him.

“Rodney said the arrows were poisoned,” Sheppard said, loud enough for Ellison, Sandburg, and Carter all three to hear. Rodney’s brain stopped worrying about werewolves, which, well, that part was a relief, but now he was worried about poisoned bullets.

“Stiles said it was aconite,” Rodney said. On the other bench, Blair started digging at his shoulder to try to see whatever Jim had found there to swear at. Ellison held him still and looked to Sam.

“They’ll meet us with a medical team, right?”

*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \----------------------  
> Psst! Sorry for the random posting... Trying to get this thing out quick, I promise!  
> \----------------------


	14. Chapter 14

When the chopper landed, a medical team was waiting. Carter’s team was supposed to have gone straight back to Colorado, but that plan was going to have to wait, and Carter quickly disappeared to handle the finer details with the base. Carson had his hands full getting the young man with the arrow free of the beat-up looking kid Rodney had called Stiles the werewolf, so Rodney and Blair would be handled by the base doctors. Sheppard didn’t like it, but he knew better than to make Carson multitask to that extent, so nobody told Dr. Beckett about the two additional poisonings on board. They just stayed out of the way as Carson and his patient were off-loaded.

Stiles, however, went right up to Blair.

“Look, that guy won’t listen, but I can fix Derek. I just need the doctors to get the arrow out, and somebody’s gotta take me back to the hunters, fast. I just... gotta,” the kid appealed to Sandburg. He looked like he had been through a wringer, and there were burn marks of all goddamned things on his ribs, which just riled Sheppard a little more than he already was. Sheppard watched, curious as the kid bounced around, trying to stay out of the way without being ignored as the medics did a quick assessment on Blair. There was no missing the hard glare from Ellison as the teenager-shaped gnat buzzed around too close to the Sentinel’s Guide.

Rodney was put in a wheelchair because of the head wound making him dizzy and, as the medics took off after Carson with him, Sheppard pointed them out to Ronon and Teyla. “Stay with him, will ya? He’s... freaking out.”

The team was bigger now and Sheppard had to remember how to split his attention again. After a month of enforced medical leave and uselessness, he was back in the command chair and trying to keep up. And Sandburg and McKay had picked up strays he had to see to. Sheppard caught Blair’s attention away.

“Introduce us and get out of here, Sandburg,” he invited. Blair took the offered out reluctantly, only because he didn’t look like he was feeling so hot out there on the windy tarmac. He pointed Stiles’ attention to John.

“Talk to Colonel Sheppard, okay, Stiles? He’ll help. I gotta... go _not-die_ , preferably. So talk to John. John, this is Stiles. His dad was a cop, so be nice or I spike your food,” Blair instructed. It was amusing, and a good sign, Sheppard guessed. Considering even Rodney wasn’t coherent enough to threaten him just then, Sandburg couldn’t be too bad off. Small favors.

All the same, Sheppard noticed when Ellison wouldn’t let the medics push the wheelchair away. The man was protective.

Sheppard looked to the distrustful teenager sulking by the helicopter. He nodded toward the open side doors.

“Don’t think about stealing it. You wouldn’t get it two feet off the ground,” he offered, taking a genuine guess at the meaning behind the boy’s scowl. Sheppard waved him toward the hospital wing the others had disappeared into. “Walk with me, Stiles the werewolf. Help me figure out how my team got poisoned.”

The kid lit up, a live wire of tension as he shook his head. “I’m not-”

“I figured that. But Rodney’s a bit loopy right now, so all I’ve got is that he called you Stiles and kept trying to tell me about a werewolf, so it was a shot in the dark,” Sheppard said, satisfied he had the kid’s attention. “So right now, you want help with your friend, I want help with my friend, and neither of us is the doc in charge of ‘em. So tell me something we can work with here.”

Stiles squinted slightly. “Like what?”

“Like whatever you wanted Blair’s help with just now,” said Sheppard. “Like who the hell are these hunters? How do they help your friend? And are they the guys who shot my men?”

The teen looked aggravated. “First, I already told him. B, I don’t know. Three, they don’t. I need the stuff they put in the bullets, or on the arrows. And D, yes, because they’re assholes.”

“If you don’t know B, how do you know D?”

“Cuz I saw them do it?” replied Stiles like it was the most obvious answer and Sheppard was a moron. The kid talked faster than Rodney and was about as focused. He was agitated the whole time, didn’t trust Sheppard any further than Sheppard would be inclined to trust him. But Sandburg still seemed to trust him if he was going to threaten Sheppard’s food supply.

“Alright. I can work with this. So... one more thing,” said Sheppard, tuned into what sounded like the teen’s heart beat. “What’d Rodney mean about werewolves?”

“You’d have to ask him.” The kid’s heart beat jumped away faster than a rabbit.

“Well, I’d like to, but he’s babbling like his brain broke because of some kind of poison, so it’s not exactly possible right now. I’m trying to figure out how that happened to help the docs figure out how to fix it. Which is where you come in, right?”

“Wait. Poisoned? They shot him, but I didn’t see them poison anyone else,” said Stiles. He did seem surprised though, and it sounded like he was having trouble breathing. Panic attack just getting started, if Sheppard had to guess. They approached the medical building and Sheppard held Stiles back from going inside. He pointed to the spot on his head where there was a gash on Rodney’s.

“Rodney said the arrow was poisoned. So I’m guessing he and Blair were shot at and mostly missed,” he said. “Still don’t know _why_ but...”

Stiles was not a happy kid. “The bullets. They shot them, right? They must have coated the bullets, too. Look, this is why I gotta go find-”

“McKay was shot at by _bullets_ , not arrows?” Sheppard interrupted. Stiles nodded.

The man had some crazy luck, John figured. If there was a near-miss, Rodney could pull it off. He shook his head and tried to focus, thinking. Then he pulled the gun Ellison had stolen from the hunters from the holster on his leg. He hadn’t been the one to fire it last, so he checked it was clear and popped out the magazine.

Feeling more than a little stupid, he sniffed at the top of the clip. He knew mostly what a gun should smell like, but if the bullets were coated in some kind of poison, there had to be something different to the odor. He couldn’t exactly take them out and roll them in his palm to test it, unless he wanted to sleep in a medical bed for the next three days. Or life. From what John remembered from his science classes a lifetime ago, aconite didn’t play around.

“What are you doing?” Stiles asked in that very clear tone that said he was worried about the stranger’s sanity. But after the last month, even John still did that, so he didn’t take offense.

“Ellison confiscated two weapons. We have the bullets, as long as these are the right mags,” Sheppard said. Stiles started to grab it out of his hand, but the kid was way too much like Rodney and Sheppard saw it coming.

“Gimmie a minute!” he ordered, stepping back and blocking easily. “Something smells kinda bitter. It’s wrong. I think maybe these could be them, but I want to check with Ellison first.”

“I need it now! Just one, so I can help Derek,” said Stiles.

“Adding poison to poison isn’t gonna help him,” Sheppard replied. “But maybe the docs can help Rodney and Blair if there’s enough here to figure out the family, narrow it down.”

“Yeah, but I can still help Derek with it. He’s not... not like Rodney and Blair,” Stiles insisted. Sheppard figured the kid was near done, between his frustration and panic. Time to cut to it.

“So are you suggesting your buddy’s an actual werewolf and that’s why Rodney’s traumatized and can’t talk straight? He got scared by a werewolf?” Sheppard asked. Stiles set his jaw, some kind of stubborn streak hitting right up against his concern for a friend.

“No. Rodney’s probably talking like a vegetable because aconite is poisonous to people. And he was shot by a bullet that was coated in it. Like Derek...”

“And do you want to shoot Derek?” Sheppard held the magazine up.

“No! I’m trying to help him!”

“With aconite. AKA wolfsbane. AKA... Poison. Bullets.” Sheppard waited the kid out, lightly turning the magazine in his hands so that Stiles could see but not touch.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Stiles huffed at him. The kid was distressed and John almost felt bad for it. Except. He didn’t.

“Thank you. Rodney in there’ll be the first person in line to agree with you,” said Sheppard. He paused and waited for Stiles to try again, but no luck. He sighed.

“Okay. Let’s try this. You answer a simple yes or no, got it? Is my doc in there right now working on trying to get an arrow out of a werewolf? Actual _Awwoooo_ werewolf?” he asked.

Stiles fidgeted, chewed on his lip, stomped muddy boots. Sheppard almost swore he could smell the anxiety on the kid, but that was a whole new level of weird he didn’t want to think about. He was calmly talking about werewolves. He was at his max limit for the moment.

Finally, Stiles nodded. He seemed slightly confused. “Yes. But he’s not gonna hurt anybody. _If_ I can help him!”

“See? That wasn’t so hard,” said Sheppard. In the grand scheme of his life the last few years, werewolves back on earth made a ridiculous amount of sense. But that didn’t mean he wanted Carson playing with one in an OR. Especially if the thing was ugly enough to have spooked Rodney so badly.

“Come on then. Let’s go help Derek,” he said, holding the door open for Stiles. The kid raced into the base hospital wing at the invite but then stopped and looked around at boring corridors and lobby areas, like he had been duped somehow.

“Where did they go?” Stiles turned back to ask.

Sheppard himself was quietly realizing the flaw in his plan as well. He had spent all day in nature, which was an entirely different wall of sensory input than a hospital. The radiation in the building pricked at his skin and the noise was much louder now that he was surrounded by it. John still had the earplugs from the helicopter, but he wasn’t sure it would cut the worst of it, so he didn’t want to coddle himself on base. He lasted all day in the woods, he could figure out a hospital. No, Sheppard had to try it without the training wheels, beeps and swooshes and machine alarms be damned.

There was still no way to overlook that the day’s chaos would have been handled ten times faster if he had been allowed a comms radio.

Instead, Sheppard found a nurse and put on the charm as he asked about the contractor doctor who had just brought in a patient.

“He’s in surgery,” the nurse said.

“Yes... where? He’s working with my team and I need to get him some new information. Absolutely vital.”

“Sir-”

“Lieutenant Colonel,” Sheppard corrected, helpful but not so subtle. “Where can I find Dr. Carson Beckett?”

The nurse hesitated. Finally, in light of Sheppard’s serious-face and Stiles’ anxious bouncing, she led the way. The place was still a hospital, with too many hallways, but Sheppard was starting to get a handle on the noises and the caustic smells. His skin crawled but it was ignorable. The dial trick was starting to work.

While the nurse was there, Sheppard politely did nothing more than peek through the window in the door and order Stiles to sit in a chair in the hall instead of buzz around. Once he had convinced the nurse to leave, however, the very moment she had turned the corner, he pushed through into the small washroom outside the operating room. Stiles followed, but Sheppard pointed him to the wash basin.

“It’s an OR. You want in, you wait for permission. And wash up,” he said.

Stiles impatiently did as he was told, adding to the noise as Sheppard watched what went on in the operating room through the window. He saw the arrow passed along and figured that was good enough.

“Dr. Beckett!” Sheppard called out as he let himself into the OR - muddy boots and all - to put himself in Carson’s line of sight. “I need a word.”

“Busy just now, Colonel,” came the predicted reply.

“I see that. I need you to get unbusy. Now.”

There were only two staff helping Carson and the operating room wasn’t very busy. Sheppard knew better than to assume he could pull rank on soldiers in scrubs so he wasn’t going to try it. He could still get away with ordering Carson around, though. Carson handed off whatever medical task he was doing, with much grumbling, and moved briskly to frown at Sheppard to his face.

“What in bloody hell-”

“Doc, I’m gonna need you to treat that young man there the same as you would working on a _Wraith_ ,” Sheppard said, cutting short the lecture and keeping his voice very, very quiet. “And we should probably minimize his contact with the rest of the staff here.”

“What...”

“I can’t answer that right now. Is he done?”

“Aye, but for the poison. And I don’t have the means to sort that out just yet. I was going to get him stable and then run the labs...”

“Well, is he stable?”

“He’s... mostly stable?” Carson was still very uncertain about a patient that he had been working with for perhaps at most twenty minutes.

“Then let’s get him to ground somewhere with fewer sharp objects and security cameras. A-Sap.”

“Aye. Ye said wra- well, do I assume the same healing-”

“I don’t know. And we can’t find that out here.”

Carson nodded, at least settled on the course of action. “Couple stitches should do. We’ll see to getting him moved.”

“Thank you,” said Sheppard. “And then... Gonna need you to check in on McKay and Sandburg. They were poisoned, too.”

Dr. Beckett stopped to stare at Sheppard, somewhere between disbelief and highly offended that he hadn’t been looped in on that problem earlier. “Excuse me?”

“Wolfsbane,” Sheppard replied. He nodded toward the patient across the room. “Same as him.”

“Ye _can’t_ be serious.”

Sheppard nodded and shrugged. He wasn’t exactly going to start talking mythical creatures and aliens in front of a couple of air force medics.

Carson narrowed his eyes, probably would have said a lot more, but there was technically an audience. He scrapped the gloves and paper thin smock he was wearing over his clothes, including the vest he had worn all day. The last time John had seen it, Carson had gone fishing, so it was nice to know John’s surprise walk in the woods was a relaxing vacation day for the doctor. The vest was nice and clean aside from some bloody hand prints. The smock by comparison was pristine, but it went right into the contamination bins that probably were bound for an incinerator.

“Did you get the stitches in?” Carson asked the nurses he had borrowed with the OR. The answer was an affirmative, so Sheppard stepped back into the washroom to see Stiles staring in the window. He was anxious and had washed his hands, arms, and face while waiting. Sheppard handed him more paper towel so the kid could get a little closer to dried off. Stiles looked over at him, impatient for a report.

“What’d he say?”

“That Derek is okay and we’ll get him moved to a room where you can do whatever magic voodoo you think will fix him,” replied Sheppard.

As they waited, he stepped around Stiles to use the wash station himself. He took the plastic wrap off his palm and peeled it off the back of his hand. Hospital-grade sanitary care would have to do for the tattoo since it wasn’t likely he would be returning to his stuff at Cheyenne tonight. All day wandering around in the dirt and pines and creek water made the damn plastic itchy and smelly and John was done.

The tattoo looked like it was healing fine, and the color looked sharp inside the six fragments that made up the eagle now permanently inked into the back of his hand. He was glad they let him refuse the red before he zoned out. The blue reminded him of Atlantis, and with that much unnatural color on his skin, the red... would be a little too unpredictable anywhere off Earth.

He was just finishing up as Carson showed up. He held the door aside as the nurses pushed through with the bed-bound patient still knocked out. Sheppard caught Stiles by the arm to keep him from crowding them. Then they followed after Carson. Stiles wanted to be on their heels but Sheppard caught him by the back of the shirt collar - the shirt with the slashes and the burn marks all over it - and held him back, just to encourage a little less energy shoving after the guys with the scalpel collections.

“So Blair said your dad was a cop?” he asked, harmlessly casual but still fishing. Stiles nodded, distracted enough not to suspect.

“He’s dead,” Stiles said. He sounded very... detached. That didn’t sound like a good thing.

“So what about Derek then? He’s your brother?”

“Friend. He’s been helping me.”

“What about family?” asked Sheppard. “Where’s home?”

“What do you care?”

They got to a room and Sheppard made Stiles wait in the hall until the medical personnel had Derek settled.

“Aside from the whole thing where we have to send you home? I’m gonna have a mountain of paperwork for sneaking a couple of kids onto a military base, for starters. For medical care they apparently don’t even need, and that’s a whole other issue,” Sheppard told him, quiet. And that was saying nothing at all about the whole... _werewolf_ thing.

“I didn’t ask you to,” replied Stiles.

“Nope. My team did. Apparently they don’t know you’re a pain in the ass yet.” Sheppard hadn’t figured out what to do about any of it yet and was looking for some kind of clue as to why Rodney of all people wanted to take home strays when they were so far from home. He monitored the activity in the room from the doorway, keeping Stiles out of the way as the nurses hooked Derek up to machines and monitors.

“I don’t have a home, just foster care,” Stiles finally told him after a very deliberative silence. “Derek’s the only kind of family I’ve got.”

That didn’t help John’s read of the situation at all. He only had more questions and a much clearer view of how close to the edge the boy was. He wasn’t just a stray with an attitude, he was a trauma case who needed help. Sheppard had done a lot of pushing so far already and he didn’t want anything to break.

Inside the room, Carson was assuring the two nurses that he had seen the strange poison-like symptoms before and that really it was only a passing reaction to the silver arrow tip. Completely pulling a terrible lie out of his ass and that was why nobody military on Atlantis was allowed to play poker with the doctor.

“He’ll be fine in a jiffy, you’ll see. Thank ye both for the help.” Sheppard couldn’t help but notice that Carson put a heavier touch on the brogue as he tried to shoo the two military medics out. They weren’t his team, and AR-1 wasn’t off-world among the less civilized cultures, they were on a fully competent air force base. One with _rules_. The terrible lie raised eyebrows.

Sheppard knocked impatiently on the door frame. He couldn’t exactly claim a moral high road on bad lies to the boss, but it was torture to watch Carson flounder.

“Can the kid see his brother yet, Doc? He says he won’t get checked out until he knows he’s okay,” Sheppard announced, adding to the incentive to leave. Stiles took his cue perfectly and stepped in front of him so the nurses could see the freshly cleaned bruises and cuts.

The kid was good. The kid was _trouble_. Of course Rodney wanted to help him.

*~*~*


	15. Chapter 15

It seemed to be taking forever, but Stiles reminded himself he had spent more time digging through a dumpster for aconite bullets then he had so far on the military base. And before that, in Beacon Hills, he couldn’t have been out for too long, right? They had to still be in the window. Derek would be okay.

John seemed to be pretty up-front so far, and he was surprisingly chill about the werewolf thing, so Stiles maybe almost trusted him. The guy pissed him off a lot though. He reminded Stiles of his dad, with the sarcasm and the automatic bullshit-detector always engaged. And Stiles still didn’t know what to do about his dad yet.

He had Derek in the same room as him, and he couldn’t help his friend, so he really, really couldn’t help his dad.

Instead, Stiles tried to help John get the nurses out of the room. He almost added a cough to really sell it, but John set a hand to his shoulder as a cue to enter the room so Stiles figured it was overkill.

“Stiles, this is Dr. Carson Beckett. Another friend of Blair and Rodney’s,” John said, pleasantries prompted as the nurses made their way to the door. Stiles hardly noticed, just stayed out of their way, his eyes scanning Derek. John let the door snick softly closed after the nurses before grabbing gloves out of the box on the wall behind it. He shoved two at Stiles and kept two for himself.

“Aye, we met in the chopper,” said Carson, sounding a whole new kind of tired. “Were it not for Teyla, the lad’d have punched me in the nose at half a chance when he came to.”

That was probably news, since John hadn’t been on the chopper with them the whole time. He snapped the gloves to catch Stiles’ attention away from Derek.

“Hey!” John said, very clearly talking to Stiles. Only reluctantly did Stiles look over at him when told to. “No hitting my team. Got it? Otherwise we gotta have words.”

“Whatever. Derek-” Stiles cut off as John held up a bullet.

“Gloves,” he ordered. “I already got two down from this stuff, and I’m trying _not_ to piss off Rodney here.”

Stiles hurried to get the gloves on before taking the bullet.

“I need, like, a knife, and - and... a lighter,” Stiles said, stumbling over words as he tried to recall the trick he had only done a few times before. Derek had always helped him. That wasn’t happening this time.

“Whatever for?” asked Dr. Beckett. He still sounded pissed off, even if his accent made it comical.

“Don’t worry about it, Carson,” said John. “Stiles can try his magic voodoo poison cure, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll see what we’ve got left to work with.”

“What _I’ll_ have left, ye mean,” replied Carson.

“It’ll work,” Stiles assured them, not appreciating the peanut gallery. John handed over a heavy duty utility knife and a lighter, tapping his shoulder encouragingly.

“I don’t see _how_!” Carson replied.

“Doc... until you and I have a better idea of what we’re dealing with, I vote we _not_ get in the way of the kid who says he does. Alright? Just... settle down.”

“Oh, it’s a _democracy_ now? I’m a doctor, and I’ll just sit here and watch the boy poison himself, and m’patient, then. Two against one?”

“He’s got gloves,” defended John, threading a very fine needle with a very irritated doctor. “And the kid’s name is Stiles, so don’t go forgetting your bedside manner now. He’s gotta be, what, eighteen? Not a-”

“Seventeen,” corrected Stiles. He was distracted working on prying the bullet apart in his lap where the men couldn’t see and actually kind of appreciated John keeping Dr. Beckett off his back by arguing with him.

“See, he’s seventeen, so... not exactly a _boy_.” John wasn’t exactly selling anybody on that argument, either.

“Aye, the lad’s graduated to dancing queen by now, apologies,” returned Beckett, irritation plain.

“You two married or something? Jeeze. Nag, nag, nag,” Stiles shot back at the pair of them.

“Har har. You done poisoning your boyfriend yet or is it Carson’s turn to try again?” replied John.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Stiles, annoyed now as well as nervous.

“Uh huh. Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it, Stiles,” replied John. “What’d you need the lighter for-”

Stiles answered by finally lighting the powdered aconite in the bullet casing just over the wound, and then dumping the ash, still hot, into the stitched up injury as Derek had shown him a few times before. It was a shitty way to do it, mixing the aconite with the gunpowder, but it burned the aconite hotter and kept the poison out of the air. Stiles still ducked back from the flare of fire that jumped up, white and yellow and blue sparks. Carson nearly fell over on the other side of the bed.

“Shit!” John started scrambling to unhook the sensors that attached Derek to the monitors before something screamed and brought the nurses back in.

“Bloody hell! What was that!” Carson demanded.

“I don’t know,” Stiles said, trying honesty. “But I fixed him. I think.”

And Stiles sat on the edge of the bed as he watched the color return to Derek’s face and the unnatural, glowing blue veins disappeared off his shoulder. In another few seconds, the wound had healed completely and no one could tell from looking at him that Derek hadn’t simply fallen asleep under the blankets.

Oh. _Shit_.

Blankets.

Derek would need clothes when he woke up, and Stiles didn’t even begin to know how to broach that subject with John. Distracting himself from the problem, Stiles tugged the stitches loose from Derek's healing shoulder with the point of the knife John had loaned him. Then he tossed the knife and lighter back to their owner to reclaim. John collected the bullet and casing, too, peeking carefully inside like he could see what had made the trick work.

Beckett moved around the bed to check that the wound was gone, up close and under the careful pokings of a trained doctor of some sort.

“How’d he do that?” the doctor asked. He looked to John like the man might have answers. John shrugged.

“Werewolf perk?” he replied. Beckett blinked repeatedly, his mouth appearing to have gotten stuck.

“Were- excuse me?”

John shrugged again. “Let’s face it, Carson, this is not the weirdest thing we’ve ever seen. Just... in the last month alone.”

“Yes, but here?!” The man wiped at his face, a hand over his mouth as he stared at Derek again and tried to process.

“Again, _not_ the weirdest thing we’ve come across even here,” said John. Carson had to think about it another moment before nodding agreement, though he still seemed slightly dazed. He slowly came to his sharper senses and looked to Stiles.

“And since you’re so hellbent on helpin’ him, I wager he’s not the one who scratched you up like a cat post?” the doctor asked. Stiles weighed the question very carefully, not sure how much he trusted Carson. Both of the adults were taking this far too well, considering Scott’s own mother had stopped talking to him after seeing him as a werewolf that first time. Now a couple of military science-geeks were fine with it based on just the concept alone? No way. Too easy.

“No. The hunters,” Stiles said, only a small lie.

“Ehhh. Try again,” said John. The military man stepped forward to crowd Carson near where Stiles sat. “Family or not, was Derek one of the people who hurt you?”

Stiles looked over at him, surprised at having been caught out for the half-truth. John had helped him so far. Finally he shook his head. “No. There’s this... pack of Alphas. They’re the ones who took my dad. And me. They’re why we were hiding in the woods for the hunters to find us in the first place.”

John still stared at him for a moment before he nodded. “Okay then. Thanks. So pack of alphas... meaning more _werewolves_?” he asked. Stiles nodded.

“Bad ones,” he replied.

“Oh goody,” said John, looking to a still gobsmacked Dr. Beckett. “We have _good_ werewolves and _bad_ werewolves. Sounds familiar enough.”

Stiles tried to ignore them, looking instead to Derek. If he had actually helped, Derek’s system had to process through whatever sedative he had been given, and that shouldn’t take too long. But Stiles was still stuck in limbo in the meantime. Hoping no one asked him where his friend’s clothes were, because he didn’t know where John’s team had put his backpack when they shoved them all on a helicopter.

“So their systems... they heal?” asked the doctor. He had edged back in against the bed and was shuffling through pockets on his vest looking for something. A boxy thing that looked like a PalmPilot in a funny case fell out and landed on Derek’s arm, so Stiles automatically reached over to grab it away before it fell further. He was irritated at the doctor’s clumsiness, the rudeness of hitting an unconscious patient like that, but on second thought considered slapping Derek until he woke up. Instead he watched as Carson pulled out a stethoscope to listen to Derek’s chest.

“Yeah, they heal. Super fast metabolism, too,” said Stiles, distracted. He looked over at John briefly. “Look, where’s Blair? Didn’t you want your guy to look at him and Rodney? Derek’s gonna be fine, so I can handle this...”

“Yeah, I think we’ll just go ahead and wait him out,” said John, nodding toward Derek and in no apparent hurry. Even still, he tapped at the small computer Stiles still held in his hand. “Carson, why’d you bring this?”

Stiles looked down to see the screen lit up and various dots on it, like some kind of game. He moved to hand it back to the doctor. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to turn it on. Was just... trying to keep it from breaking.”

Carson slowly took the earpieces from his ears and draped the scope over his neck, then looked to John and back to Stiles with a slow dawning surprise. “Tis alright, lad. You won’t hurt it.”

“It’s a tracker,” John offered, pointing Stiles’ attention to the various dots on the screen. “Uh, let’s go with these blue dots there are Rodney and Blair.”

Neither man took the device from him, so Stiles looked it over more closely. “How do you know that? They’re just dots.”

A band along the side of the screen popped up with words, at first only strange characters that were nowhere near anything English. Stiles blinked, refocused, and recognized the name Blair Sandburg by one dot, Rodney McKay by another. He thought he remembered Rodney mentioning someone named Teyla that afternoon, and there on the screen was the name Teyla Emmagan. Stiles gawked. He tried to hold it up to John again.

“Is this your team?”

John leaned over enough to read the screen. “Yep. That’s them. Well, half, anyway. Missing Ronon Dex and, uh, Jim Ellison.”

A moment later, two other dots turned blue, and the names showed up on the screen. Stiles dropped the small tablet to the bed, not caring that it bumped up against Derek.

“That’s creepy...”

“You get used to it,” John told him, sounding somewhat resigned. He picked up the box and waved it at Carson. “It’s called a Life Signs Detector. He wasn’t _supposed_ to bring it on this trip.”

“I thought it might be useful,” said Carson. “Wasn’t planning on running into anybody who could use it down here...”

The two men looked from each other to Stiles. John shrugged and reached over to put the device back in Carson’s vest pocket.

“Well, you found one,” the Colonel said.

Stiles was confused. “I just picked it up-”

“Don’t worry about it,” said John. They were apparently supposed to drop it. He pointed suddenly to the chain around Stiles’ neck. “Those dogtags your dad’s or Derek’s?”

Stiles’ hand went protectively to his shirt over the tags in question, off balance from the topic shift. “My dad’s.”

“What’s his name?” asked John.

“Why?”

“I want to make sure the VA’s office knows to get you taken care of,” replied John. “His local boys aren’t doing the best job. Maybe the service can do better.”

Stiles’ mood darkened a little. The colonel wasn’t meaning to push for once, but he just didn’t know anything at all.

“The hunters attacked the sheriff’s station. Kinda shattered everybody. The hunters and the alphas weren’t our fault,” he said. “So the new guy’s been busy.”

“That’s fair,” said John. He paused and shrugged. “Still. I wanna look into it. See what we can do. If you’re alright with it, anyway.”

The offer seemed genuine and was a surprise. Considering the only thing Stiles had to his name otherwise was the friendship of a solitary omega werewolf who didn’t want to see him dead yet, it wasn’t like he had anything to lose for letting someone else try to help, too. Stiles finally nodded.

“Sure,” he replied. “Thanks.”

*~*~*

“Well, I mean, he was a wolf at the time he was shot, and the aconite triggered the shift _after_ he passed out, so it’s not like he really had time to... you know. Find his clothes first.”

Stiles’ eventual explanation for why he wanted to _steal_ surgical scrubs should have been predictable, maybe even funny, but it once again reminded Sheppard that the dark-eyed young man stuck in the hospital bed with the unfading blank mask on his face was at least equal parts wolf as human. Somehow.

Carson was probably itching to get blood samples, spare tissue, the remnants from a snot rag, - anything at all really,- under a microscope, but he was afraid to ask. Derek wasn’t exactly the chatty type, and he looked like he’d be a pretty poor excuse for a lab rat. He sassed Stiles liberally though, so he had a sense of humor that Sheppard had seen, and he was quite protective of his younger friend. All told, the lack of clothes under the hospital blankets would not dissuade him from leaving for very long.

“I’m just saying, it’s something you might have _mentioned_ before he woke up,” Sheppard said to Stiles. “We could have left by now if we’d already had the gear here.”

“I can walk out of here any time,” Derek said bluntly, not at all bothered and too eager to push back in Stiles’ defense. John stared back at him, eyebrow raised up at the challenge.

“Well, okay, I guess. But this is an Air Force base. There are rules. So how fast do you want to get your naked ass tossed in the brig? I was kinda trying to save you from that, but...” Sheppard broke off in a shrug.

“He meant as a wolf,” said Stiles.

“Oh, no, son. No, he didn’t,” said Carson. And Derek didn’t argue the correction. Sheppard checked the baggy pockets of his BDUs.

“Damn. No service vest on me. Can’t sneak you in with the bomb squad dogs. The wolf’ll get shot before the naked guy’ll get tackled into a padded room,” John said. “So. You both sit here and wait. And I’ll go see if my team picked up your stuff.”

“Fine,” said Derek. The kid sounded a bit pissed, but Sheppard was fine with that, too. This werewolf thing was a bit of an experiment, and John was the one with a gun full of werewolf-bullets strapped to his leg. Stiles seemed to have forgotten that, but Sheppard was willing to bet money that Derek could smell it. So they would both play nice as they sized each other up over the next little while.

“And you, Stiles. You sit. And let Carson check you over. I’m talking band-aids, stitches, the _works_ ,” said John, pointing the teen to sit on the bed at Derek’s feet. “Hale can supervise, but I want it done. Not gonna save you from hunters or whatever just to have you drop off from an infected paper-cut or something. Ya got me?”

“Fine,” grumbled Stiles. It was surprising when the kid hopped up onto the bed and shucked his shirt, but John kept it off his face better than Carson could. The kid was all bruises to match the claw marks that had been visible through the torn spots on the shirt.

“Is that a bloody _burn_ , lad?” Carson nearly yelped it as he went for a fresh pair of gloves.

“Hunters have this thing for light-saber cattle prods,” Stiles said, annoyed. Carson dissolved into a quiet litany of Gaelic complaints that were probably mostly oaths against the hunters’ heritage and Sheppard left the room rather than stand around and agree with him.

He remembered the general direction the LSD had said his team would be found and headed for it, hoping that by some chance they had all wound up on the same floor. It was a nice daydream, but in reality, Sheppard marched himself up three flights of stairs seeking out the sound of a familiar voice among the blare of the hospital. He should have taken the LSD back from Carson before he left. Instead he very tentatively minded the dials as he tried to listen without triggering a zone out.

John knew he was tired, realizing with great annoyance how off his game he had become over the past month. A walk in the woods shouldn’t leave him craving a nap. Sure he had been walking for over eight hours, but that wasn’t much compared to their usual off-world misadventures. Maybe Sandburg had known what he was talking about when he tried to warn him about the impact the day’s mission would have on him.

Sandburg hadn’t predicted the whole ‘ _ending up in the hospital with werewolf poisoning_ ’ part. _That_ part would have been nice to have had some heads up on, but it was probably McKay’s crazy luck rather than Sandburg’s fault.

John was also aware that he was greatly annoyed. Not at any one person, but rather at little bits of everything and anything that wasn’t his team. He was somehow more annoyed at the existence of the so-called hunters than he was at the existence of werewolves, but he was also mildly irritated that his team had found a werewolf who had apparently grown up for a time at a nudist colony. It was another complication on the pile.

Sheppard hadn’t seen his team in just about an hour, after having been literally looking for them all day, and he needed to get a report on how McKay and Sandburg were doing, but there seemed to be delay after delay.

When he did finally find them, it was mostly thanks to Teyla, who stood outside the room in the hallway, going back and forth with Carter over the radio. She looked up and smiled when she saw him exit the stairwell.

“Colonel Sheppard has found us again, Colonel Carter,” she reported after a crackle on the hand-held radio. “I will pass along your message.”

“Thank you, Teyla. I’ll see you all shortly,” said Carter’s voice. By then, Sheppard was half way down the hall and dodging the feeling that he’d missed a red-tape bullet. Teyla met him halfway.

“Teyla,” he greeted as he approached. “How’s McKay? And Sandburg.”

“The doctor is hopeful they will both recover quickly,” Teyla reported easily. John took a breath and tried to relax at the good news. He wasn’t about to argue with Rodney’s luck just then. He reached out and caught her arm as she caught his, a thankful greeting she had taught the team early on, but it had the added bonus of giving him something familiar to hang on to for even a second. Teyla didn’t let go of his arm very quickly, guiding him instead a step further away from the rest of his team to a small waiting area with chairs.

“How are you, Colonel?” she asked. She was probing in her way, somehow eerily psychic about things even though she wasn’t. Teyla could read people better than anyone, and she was working on Sheppard now. That was probably fair, but John couldn’t risk it. He shook his head and casually shrugged it off.

“Oh, I’m fine. Just juggling since the team got split up,” he said, sticking with the tip of the iceberg and hoping that was all she could see.

“Yes. And Colonel Carter asked me to remind you that you’re expected to stay with Ronon and I when she is not, as we do not have sufficient identification for this posting,” Teyla replied, frowning. “She did say she is on her way now.”

Well, _hell_.

Heaving a sigh, John dropped into a nearby chair. The day was determined to get Sheppard one way or another, coming or going it didn’t seem to matter, so that news fit right in.

“John?” Teyla asked, moving to sit beside him.

“Yep,” was all he had to reply with. Reporting in. His brain was too busy going in a dozen different directions.

“Where’s Carson?”

“Three floors down, with the others who don’t have proper creds to be on base,” Sheppard replied. “God, I miss home.”

“You can have more than one home,” Teyla reminded him.

“Yeah, maybe. But everything is black or white here. All rules and regs. And life still happens in that... murky gray stuff in between. I’m rusty at making it all line up in the right boxes,” John said. “Like the senses thing. It’s either too much, or not enough. Get stuck in a zone out and you’re out for the count.”

Teyla let his observation settle before patting John on the arm again, supportive but letting him form his own conclusions. She knew too much and John knew she had to be judging him for it, but the “how” was another one of those gray areas Sheppard had no answers for.

“What made you come up here without them?” she asked instead.

“The kid needs clothes, and they’re in his backpack. Wasn’t sure if it was one of those I’d seen you pull from the chopper,” he told her.

“I believe so. I’ll collect it, and Ronon, and we will all go back to them. So Colonel Carter need not worry,” Teyla said, thoughtful and decisive. Sheppard looked up at her, surprised and yet not at the simple solution she offered under the guise of common sense.

“Can we pretend that was my idea?” John asked, waving a finger between them idly, a small grin on his face at the joke. “Ya know, make me feel like I can still do my job. A little ego triage...”

“It was your idea,” Teyla replied, confident in the statement as she was in anything else. “That’s why you came up here when you could.”

She winked at him over her smile, then she stood. “Stay here. Rodney has been asking where you went, so it’s best not to disturb him yet.”

And there went John’s self-confidence again as he was apparently hiding from the injured member of his team. At least he had been granted a few seconds in between blows to keep his feet under him.

Teyla disappeared into the room, returning quickly with Ronon at her heels. By then, John stood waiting for them, ready to move. He saw Jim Ellison pace to the wall behind the door inside the patient room, looking out after Teyla and Ronon to fix a steady stare at Sheppard.

“Don’t tell Rodney,” Sheppard said, no volume to his voice, but more than loud enough for Ellison to hear. “We’ll be right back.”

Ellison’s mouth tightened in a grim line but he nodded. Then he closed the door, a move John hoped was just an excuse for the field trip the man had taken to otherwise glare at his new CO.

Taking the stairs made Sheppard at least feel more productive with his time, and he knew the two with him were good for the extra effort. They’d take the elevator back up with Carson and Stiles. Just then, John could drop down the steps two at a time and double-time it back to the doc and the two kids.

“Tattoo is healing,” Ronon reported from behind and above him, noting the hand Sheppard kept on the railing. John nodded.

“So far, so good,” he replied.

“It looks like Atlantis,” said Teyla. “I like it.”

“It’s an eagle. Those five pieces underneath, that kinda wrap around like wings? They’re supposed to be the senses. Or something like that.”

“Huh. From the red one on Ellison, I figured it was a military thing,” said Ronon. John looked down at his hand again, reconsidering the Sentinel Project’s chosen team brand. Five senses, sure. But they also owned a good sized chunk of the five branches of the US military, too. Maybe the Satedan had an angle on it.

“It is,” Sheppard confirmed. “It’s the Project’s marker. Permanent ID badge. Sentinel thing, though. I just get to keep my rank with the military.”

“Sounds complicated,” Ronon concluded.

“They definitely tried to make it that,” said John. They hit the right level and Sheppard had to pretend he wasn’t winded as he held the stairwell door open for his team. One month of being in medically-ordered lockdown was four weeks too many. When they got back to training, Ronon was going to kick his ass. Sheppard’s pride wasn’t gonna make it.

When they got back to the room Carson had taken over, Stiles was half bandages and Derek Hale looked at least a little like he had started to back down. Sheppard tossed the backpack at him as he walked in, and Hale was up and out of bed like they were hanging out in the men’s locker room.

“Teyla! Maybe stay by the door,” John said quickly. Derek just got dressed quicker, but Ronon lurked protectively in front of her and squinted suspiciously at the young man who was very clearly no longer injured.

“You were shot,” he said, an accusation if anything.

“I got better,” replied Derek.

“How.”

“Well, guys, that’s complicated too,” said Sheppard, trying to run interference on his team again. “Ronon, Teyla, these are Rodney and Blair’s new friends, Stiles and Derek. We’re gonna be keeping them outta trouble for a bit. So play nice, hmm?”

Now that Derek was dressed, Teyla was able to politely step out from behind the Ronon-shaped shield and greet them. “I am glad to see you well,” she said. She noted the bandage Carson was setting over Stiles’ ribs, however, and John saw her frown.

“They’re _better_ ,” he said. “And Derek’s got a great metabolism. Good to go.”

“ _That’s_ not something metabolism can fix,” said Ronon.

“You’re right, but that’s the story we’re sticking to until McKay gets better, too,” said Sheppard. His brain hurt.

“McKay said they were shapeshifters,” said Ronon. And just like that, the really big wolf was out of the bag of cats. Shit.

“To who?”

“ _Us_. He won’t shut up.”

“He’s ill, Ronon,” said Teyla. “It’s not his fault.”

Sheppard rubbed at the tension headache in his forehead with the heels of his hands, taking the tiny opportunity to hide from the world for a second. Derek’s eyes shifted from him to Ronon to the door and back, and it was mildly amusing that the kid hadn’t pegged Teyla as a threat yet, but John wasn’t about to correct him on it. Stiles had grabbed his own shirt back like he was taking his signals from Hale and not the doctor patching him up. Great.

“Rodney’s drugged, currently, so nobody should be paying attention to anything he says,” said Sheppard, the announcement firm and his mind made up. Rodney had a big brain, sure, but it was probably still loopy. He snagged one of the larger bandages from Carson’s rolling work-table that came with the room. Another few steps and John had unwrapped the over-sized band-aid and stuck it to Derek’s chest, just at his shoulder and easily visible under his shirt collar. The werewolf stared at him, assessing but not outwardly offended by John getting in his space without asking.

“You pretend that hurts until I say otherwise. Let’s not over-complicate things right now, alright?” Sheppard asked, staring the young man full in the face so he could be sure he was listened to. Derek seemed to be debating it longer than necessary, so Ronon took a step forward, using his physical presence to back Sheppard’s order. That seemed to seal the deal and Derek folded his arm up against his ribs like he was protecting and favoring an injured shoulder.

“Ow,” he said, tone dry.

Sheppard turned away to look over at Stiles and the quiet Dr. Beckett who looked on from across the bedside.

“Carson,” John said, his own tone still holding a warning. “I’m gonna need you to lift the medical restrictions on drinking.”

“Dream on, Colonel. Especially now,” came the reply.

_Goddamnit_.

*~*~*


	16. Chapter 16

By the time Sheppard did make it back to check on McKay and Sandburg, McKay had talked himself to sleep. He was hooked up to almost everything Carson wanted him on, however, so it was decided to let him stay that way. The doctor in charge of his care assured them there had been no threats of losing his PopTarts and only minimal nausea so the prognosis was good, and he took Dr. Beckett’s suggestions as Rodney’s primary care physician seriously.

Sandburg, on the other hand, was awake and alert and driving Ellison to irritation. A little queasy, Blair said, but otherwise fine despite Jim’s concerns. Ellison didn’t like the color or smell of the wound - the same thing Sheppard had noticed as the blood wiped away from McKay’s forehead on the chopper - and there was something about _Blair’s_ smell involved there somewhere but John cringed his way into ignoring that bit of their conversation.

Blair was hooked up to his own IV of nutrients even though he said he was fine, and he refused to sit in the hospital bed. The best Ellison could do was get the man to sit in a wheelchair. No one was overly willing to let the Guide dismiss the problem, however, with the Sentinel hovering nearby. Both Sandburg and McKay had definitely come into contact with a potentially deadly toxin and they would not be leaving until it was cleared out.

In the meantime, Carson took over McKay’s care and cleared the room to keep Rodney asleep. Blair was all too happy to walk himself out of the room, with a little metal IV rack in tow, but Ellison insisted on the wheelchair being used for the intended purpose.

“I don’t _need_ a wheelchair,” Blair hissed at Jim once they were out in the hall with the others again.

Teyla and Ronon were babysitting the werewolves, and at least half of that equation seemed to be getting along okay. Ronon and Derek were going to need their own time-out corners if they didn’t come to an understanding soon, however.

Sheppard leaned on the wall between the werewolf-and-alien group and the lightly bickering Sentinel team, unconsciously trying to track each set. He crossed his arms and slouched comfortably enough, looked from face to face, then glanced to the closed door across the hall. He could easily hear Carson muttering at Rodney even though the doc had kicked everyone out so the man wouldn’t wake up. It was just loud enough to let John split his attention three ways, but he wasn’t sure he could keep it up very long.

“If you zone out, I’m not letting Carson stick an oxygen mask on your face,” said Ellison’s voice, just at the edge of Sheppard’s awareness. John took that as a sign he had slipped a little too close to the edge and needed to center himself again. It took him a minute but he pulled his attention back to the pair beside him. He nodded his thanks.

“Sorry. Keeping track of too many people,” he muttered, scrubbing at his face. “And I swear to god, those kids...”

“Hey, I told you today was going to be brutal, man,” said Blair. He shrugged and toyed with the wheels on the chair Ellison had all but forced him into. “Maybe I didn’t know it would be this bad, but we told you it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. You’re holding up alright.”

Sheppard laughed under his breath. “We haven’t even gotten through day one and Carter’s already spent the last hour cleaning up after my team. And McKay is never, _ever_ gonna let this go. I just want to go back to bury myself in a bunker and sleep it off.”

“Sounds about right,” said Ellison.

“Maybe you should go sit with McKay,” added Blair. “It’ll be quiet in there.”

“I’ll check on him when Carter’s here to get everybody else,” Sheppard replied. “Hopefully she found a place to stash everybody until we can head out.”

“We’re not due at the Project until tomorrow. And if Rodney’s not ready to go, it will wait. General O’Neill set the timeline, so he’ll be okay with bumping it back, right?” asked Blair.

Sheppard offered a shrug. “Probably. But if I gotta get to base, McKay will be safe here until he can catch up. He doesn’t want to be involved in all this, anyway.”

“Well, he is,” replied Ellison. “You’ll go when he goes.”

That sounded a lot like an order more than an observation and Sheppard looked over at the Sentinel. It hit him wrong, and Sandburg’s heart rate spiked sharply, like he was reacting to something Ellison had said. “Why? It’s my call. If I wanna send my team back to the SGC, I can. It’s only a week, and I’ll learn just fine on my own,” said Sheppard.

“And you’ll learn better with McKay,” said Ellison. “So it’s up to you how much time you want to waste covering basics.”

“Why.” It was a challenge, not a question and John shifted away from the wall toward Jim.

“Colonel Sheppard, go sit with Drs Beckett and McKay,” interrupted Sandburg. He even stood up, angled himself to block Ellison, even though he was shorter. Sheppard and Ellison were eye to eye over the Guide’s head, and there was enough attitude happening between the three of them that even Ronon was looking on from his place down the hall. But it was all just bad attitude on display, and John wasn’t sure if he or Ellison were most at fault for it. He eased back to the wall.

“When Carter gets here,” he said.

“I’ve got your team when you can’t,” said Sandburg. “That’s why they put me here. So go rest. Carter will be here soon enough,”

Sheppard glared at the floor, stuck in an internal debate over pushing himself or being pushed around by an injured geek who probably couldn’t swat a mosquito with a clear conscience. Finally he gave up. On Sentinel stuff, Sandburg outranked him, and it had been an order. John glanced over and saw Ronon watching him very close, ready to jump in, but not clear yet on which side. Sheppard shook his head.

“Just look out for the kids,” John told him, a glance at Teyla including her in the request. What had been their informal task was now official, so Ronon paced away to check the security of the area outside the visitors’ lounge. It was a goddamn Air Force base, but that didn’t mean much to Dex. John’s team was not trained for Earth missions. But it gave Ronon something to do, and John understood the feeling.

Without another word, Sheppard let himself back into the patient room. Carson looked up at him from the chair near Rodney’s bed. The man was silently reading from the book Sandburg had given him the day before. McKay let out a snort, just barely not snoring as he lay bandaged and oblivious to the visit. It was suddenly very familiar. And John was somehow more tired.

“He’s fine, John,” Carson offered up. Sheppard nodded.

“So I hear,” he replied, gesturing vaguely toward the snoring so plainly happening.

“They don’t have an antidote per se, but they dosed him with the next best thing, an’ I added something to help bump up the hydration. An’ checked his shoulder. He’ll complain, tomorrow, but he’ll be right.” Carson was whisper quiet, no volume to his voice at all, and watching Sheppard to be sure he was still understood. It took John a few words to realize the man wasn’t speaking normally. That hit John the wrong way, like he was being played somehow, just like when Ellison had pushed at him in the hall. Like there was a broad conspiracy and his own team was out to get him.

“Sandburg says I’m tired,” John reported, nodding toward the book in Carson’s hands. “There something in there about Guides being some kinda psychic?”

“No. Pretty sure the look on your face says it plain enough, no psychic needed,” said Carson.

“Fine. You tell Carter about Stiles and the gene,” said John. He moved into the room to crash as quietly as possible into the bed Sandburg had earlier refused. He sunk face-first into the pillow, moving only just enough to be sure he could still breathe. “And werewolves. You can handle them, too. I’m under orders to nap.”

There was a pause, Carson probably waiting for further explanation but John didn’t have any to pass along. Carson turned the page on his book.

“Understood, Colonel.”

*~*~*

That afternoon, Blair and Rodney had made it quite clear that they were some kind of science nerds working with a team to do science tests. But not once had he seen them do anything sciencey. Now Stiles watched their team linger around the hospital hallway and it was also very clear that the team had a grand total of two science nerds.

With the way Derek and the big guy with the dreadlocks watched each other - a couple of pacing wolves circling each other for a fight without moving at all somehow - Stiles wanted to bet that Ronon Dex was some kind of shifter. But he had a massive gun in a holster on his thigh that Stiles didn’t think was a toy, either, so he opted not to ask the man anything.

The lady who had introduced herself as Teyla, though, was nice. They hadn’t exactly met on the helicopter, more like she played interference then, but she was okay. She smiled easily, and seemed actually concerned when she asked if he and Derek would be safe when the Colonel returned them to their home. Stiles actually felt bad for lying when he said he’d be okay. The question was way too complicated for him to think about.

Stiles noticed when Sheppard snapped at Blair’s partner Ellison, too. The Colonel had met Stiles’ sass alright since the helicopter, in a very familiar kind of way, but he hadn’t expected to look over and see the man square off with someone on his own team. He didn’t think civilian science-nerd contracts like Blair could pull rank on an Air Force Colonel, either.

“What happened to John?” Stiles asked Teyla, after the man had been sent to his room and Ronon had moved off to pace the halls. Teyla’s smile had faded by then as she looked over at where Blair and Ellison whispered harshly at each other.

“John... has been getting headaches of late. They come and go rather unpredictably. He means no harm, but he is in pain,” she told him.

“Maybe there’s something going around. I’ve been fighting those since Derek got me out,” Stiles said, distracted watching Blair lecture Ellison about something in near silence. He couldn’t quite hear because they stood down the hall, in front of Rodney’s room, some twenty feet from the floor’s waiting lounge.

“ _Be that as it may, Chief, the Program isn’t going to cut them any breaks on this. It’s in Beckett’s damn report_ ,” Jim said, somehow loud enough of a whisper that Stiles could hear it. Teyla touched his arm and drew his attention back.

“Did you tell Carson?” she asked. Stiles blinked at her, trying to track the conversation he was in rather than the one he was snooping on.

“Tell him what?”

“About your headaches. He may have something that could help,” said Teyla.

“Oh. No. I just... they were drugging my food. I just gotta come down off whatever it was. When the headaches stop, I figure I can go home. It’ll be fine,” he replied. There was no way to really sugar-coat it, and Teyla wasn’t a social worker so he couldn’t get in trouble for it. Derek, though, shoved out of the chair beside Stiles and went to walk by the windows across the room. Anything related to the Alphas was an untouchable topic with him now, and he couldn’t exactly shift into a wolf to get away from the subject. Even Teyla seemed to see his anxiety on it. She watched Derek for a moment before turning her attention to Stiles again.

“While you’re with us, please mention the headaches to Carson. You should not be in recovery alone from something such as that. It could have adverse, lasting effects, and Dr. Beckett has much experience treating drug and toxin interactions among our teams who return unwell from their missions. You will be in good care,” she promised. Stiles shrugged and studied the floor as he considered it. Maybe she was right.

Stiles zoned out on the tile under his shoes, staring unfocused and listening to the air around him. He could hear Derek walking between the windows and a coffee table, a magazine tossed onto the stack. Off the other way, Ronon tramped along the halls, coming back toward them.

“Stiles, lad?” The quiet call startled him. Teyla tapped his arm and pointed his attention to where Carson stood with Blair and Jim. The doctor waved him over, and Stiles looked automatically to find Derek. He was surprised to see Derek sitting in a chair across from them. When did he sit down again?

Derek tilted his head back toward Carson in a hint but he made no move to go along. Stiles stood and moved to see what the doctor wanted.

“Thought ye might want to see this,” said Carson. He handed the box Stiles had messed with earlier over to Blair. The life signs detector remained blank, just a gray box. Blair poked at the edges, tried pushing non-existent buttons on the screen, but nothing happened.

“Is it supposed to do something?” Blair asked. Carson held a finger over his lips and waved a hand to lower the conversation volume. He even glanced down the hall. Then he nodded toward Stiles.

“Try holding that and wondering on where Colonel Carter is,” the doctor instructed quietly. Stiles frowned but tried it, taking the tracker when Blair handed it over. Instantly, as before, the screen lit up. A single blue dot blinked in among the cluttered field of red dots, moving steadily in one direction across the screen. Stiles curiously changed where he stood as he watched the graphics, trying to get a sense of the direction the person represented by the dot would be coming from. He handed the tracker to Carson and then pointed toward the elevators.

“Coming from there,” he said, confident in the guess. The doctor looked at the screen before nodding confirmation.

“Aye,” he said. The device was switched off and almost put away before he hesitated and handed it to Jim. “Your turn then.”

Ellison took the device and it blinked to life. The screen didn’t look quite as bright.

“Oh, now that’s interesting,” muttered Carson to himself.

“What is?” asked Blair, leaning in from his lower vantage point of the wheelchair. Carson took the tracker from Jim and the screen resumed full brightness, even more so than it had been for Stiles.

“The tracker adjusted to his vision,” Carson said, motioning with it toward Jim. He turned it off and put it back in the baggy vest pocket.

“I assume you’re gonna explain this, Doc.” Ellison didn’t seem entertained by the curiosity. Carson nodded.

“Aye. Ah had to check a theory,” he replied. He looked between them with a nod. “And thanks for the help. Mebe don’t mention it to the Colonels, eh?”

“Doc...” Blair protested, cut short by the _ding!_ of the elevator down the hall. Carson hurried to meet it.

“Colonel, a word, please,” the doctor asked. The blonde Colonel Carter had no more stepped off the elevator before Dr. Beckett was ushering her back into it. When they disappeared, Blair and Jim looked confused and annoyed.

“What the hell just happened,” said Jim. At the same time, Blair asked, “What was that thing?”

Stiles shrugged. “A tracker. It’s weird. He’s not supposed to have it.”

“No kidding,” said Blair. He didn’t sound anymore settled on the matter. He shook his head to dismiss it anyway. Blair turned his attention to Stiles. “So how are you doing? Did Dr. Beckett get you both patched up?”

Stiles nodded. “Derek’s fine. I’m... patched up.”

“So Derek. Same dude as this afternoon? Really? Just less... scruffy?” asked Blair. “I mean, _really_? I didn’t imagine that part?”

“Yeah. He’s who was with me at camp,” said Stiles. “The hunters thought you were like him.”

“Oh, I figured that much out. You’re not though. They seemed to think they were on some kind of rescue mission,” said Blair. “Who’s Chris Argent?”

Stiles forgot he was the only one who had been tased unconscious by the hunters and grimaced, scratching at his neck as he tried to figure out how to handle what Blair obviously remembered. The science geek seemed to know what he was doing and shook his head. He grabbed Ellison’s right hand and held it up just enough so Stiles could see the tattoo.

“Just so you know, guys with these tattoos? Human lie detectors. And he’s cranky just now, so I wouldn’t recommend testing it,” he told Stiles. Ellison didn’t seem overly annoyed at the sharing and watched Stiles closely. Stiles was still surprised by the information.

“Yeah. John has one, too.”

Blair nodded. “Yeah. Same deal. Did he let you get away with much?”

That answer was a resounding _No_ and Stiles shrugged it off.

“Who’s Chris Argent?” Jim asked again.

“My current foster-whatever,” said Stiles. Blair’s good mood disappeared.

“Hold up. I watched those guys take an electrified baton to you without even thinking twice,” he said, sober and alarmed. “You’re telling me he _sent_ them to do that?”

“No,” came Derek’s voice. Stiles looked back to see Derek walking over to join their conversation more directly. “Argent sent them to do that to _me_ , or to anyone like me, who was with him. Them taking Stiles down like that was their call, but it wouldn’t have been Argent’s. He’s actually been trying to keep Stiles alive since the Sheriff’s funeral.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that the whole family is as messed up as the other hunters,” Stiles argued, quietly set-off. “I _live_ with them now. I hear it. And don’t get me started on Gerard.”

Derek set a hand on Stiles’ shoulder and he took the hint to calm down, however grudgingly. He didn’t quite understand, though. Blair, John, Carson - they had all done nothing but help so far, and helping them could have gotten at least Rodney killed. Stiles actually wanted to tell them the truth, for once.

“Whatever. Just don’t expect me to lie for them,” he muttered at Derek.

Blair and Jim listened quietly, not happy about it, but they listened.

“I’m... now, don’t misunderstand me, here, but - I’m confused,” said Blair, looking up at Derek from the chair. “Is Stiles _supposed_ to lie for him or something? Are you trying to defend Argent?”

“The Argents killed his _whole family_ , so it’s not like I know why,” Stiles cut in, the anger sneaking out.

“Chris Argent has been trying to protect Stiles from the Alphas for six months now. I couldn’t. I haven’t even been able to protect my own sister, or any of the others of my pack. There’s no way I could have done what he managed,” said Derek, sounding frustrated as he talked over Stiles. “So no, I’m not _defending_ the hunters, or the Argents. I just know they took him in for the right reasons.”

Stiles looked over at his friend, suddenly considering something that should have been some kind of impossible. “Derek, I swear to god. Tell me you didn’t set me up. You didn’t send him after me. He said it was Allison who-”

“It _was_ Allison. I didn’t do anything,” Derek replied, quick to try to correct the paranoid thought. “I told you I _couldn’t_. I just... told him not to fuck it up once the social worker ditched you with them a couple months ago.”

Stiles calmed down a little, but he still rolled his shoulder to get Derek’s hand off of him.

“Asshole,” he muttered. “I was _handling_ it.”

Jim Ellison was watching them both closely. He reminded Stiles of the detectives with the Sheriff’s department, looking for an angle to unlock the crime. Stiles found somewhere else to look before the human lie detector figured out he had a rap sheet a half a mile long.

“What’s your stake in it, then, Derek?” Ellison asked. Derek didn’t have any smart answers for that and Stiles cast a glare at him.

“He’s _shit_ at making friends, like me,” said Stiles. “And I’m the only one he’s got left.”

Derek remained stony-faced and just shrugged his shoulder - the one that wasn’t supposed to be injured - rather than argue. He didn’t say anything so he wouldn’t be caught out lying. Stiles cracked a small grin but didn’t gloat about it.

“Look... how attached are you to Beacon Hills? Because I want to very strongly suggest we not send you back there,” said Blair. “From what extremely little I’ve seen so far, Stiles isn’t going to survive going back. And Jim and I still have friends up in Washington who work for the system up there. It’s not California, but maybe they can do something to help get you to your eighteenth birthday, man.”

“But my dad -” Stiles clamped his mouth shut on the panic caused by just saying the words. Derek edged closer, offering a shield to hide behind but Stiles just barely leaned toward him. “I mean - I don’t...”

“Hey... it’s okay,” said Blair. He seemed to mean it because he almost stood up. Jim kept him in the chair with a hand on his shoulder. “It was an idea, Stiles. Think on it, that’s all I meant. I just... don’t think it’s an awesome idea to send you back to somebody who keeps company with sociopaths who attack people with electric batons and crossbows, you know? It sucks, and I’m just... definitely on board with doing anything else that’s not _that_.”

Stiles furrowed his brow and worked at not actually crying. Two things hit him at once and both triggered a very painful reaction, just a full mental shut-down and rejection: the knowledge that his dad was still alive and lost to the Alphas, and the _mere suggestion_ that Stiles just walk away from it. Because _Stiles_ couldn't help, despite a year of taking care of Scott, and there were few alternatives that didn't end up with the small, fleshy human very much dead.

Things were easier when he thought his dad was dead. Everything hurt more when he tried to figure out why his dad wanted to let the Alphas kill him. And that wasn’t something Stiles could even try to explain to anyone.

Ellison caught his attention and pointed off toward the windows across the visitors’ lounge. “Go walk it off. Nobody’s going anywhere,” he told Stiles. It sounded like as good an idea as any and Stiles moved to go breathe and stop the intrusive, harsh thoughts from hitting him in the face. Derek started to follow him but Ellison snapped his fingers to draw him back. “Derek. Sit by Teyla and leave the kid alone. He’ll be back in a minute.”

Stiles didn’t complain. He paced the floor in front of the windows by himself a few times, noticed Ronon standing guard on one side of the lounge, with Derek and the other three off on the opposite end. It took him a lot longer than a minute.

He stood against the floor to ceiling window, his forehead to the glass, and looked out at the parking lot below at the dark pavement and the bright lights of the air base around them. The last hint of sunset was just peeking out between a few buildings and a Black Hawk helicopter out on the tarmac. It had been a long damn day.

*~*~*


	17. Chapter 17

It took Stiles about a half hour of sulking by the windows before he trusted himself to try talking to anyone. By then, Carson Beckett was back. He presented himself at Stiles’ corner of the visitor’s lounge, with the weird life signs detector in hand.

“Stiles, lad. I’ve a favor to ask, if you’re of a mind to listen,” the doctor said. Stiles hesitated before nodding. He and his friends - or team, or whatever - were helping him and Derek, so Stiles could listen. Carson sat himself down in the chair across from Stiles scooted it forward and sat on the edge so he could keep his voice down. He held up the tracker just enough so Stiles could see the screen. The dots were splayed out just like before.

“Now, this bit of technology... I’ll be frank, we don’t know much about it. But we know this is what it normally looks like. What it did for you earlier, with everyone’s names? None of us have ever seen that before, and we’ve used them near every day for two years,” said Carson. Stiles’ eyes bugged slightly.

“Crap. Really?”

“Aye. What I can tell ye of this box here is that the reason we don’t know much about how they work is that they are some blend of biometrically responsive. They will only work for people who share a particular genetic fingerprint, if ye will. People like myself, or Colonel Sheppard.”

“And Ellison,” Stiles added. “And me.”

“Aye, among others. But... it’s never done this thing before. And I’d like to try to understand a bit more about why. If ye might be willing to stick with my team and I for a few days yet? See if we could get it sorted?”

There was an awful lot of crazy to what Carson was saying, and Stiles was starting to realize maybe why John had been okay helping Derek. He reached out and took the box from Carson, staring at the screen as it dimmed in his hands. The tracker adjusted and zoomed to show the two dots of Sheppard and McKay, and Ellison and Sandburg as the closest to that room.

“Is this why you and John are cool with werewolves?” he asked, half curious to see if the tracker would somehow answer his question like some kind of high-tech Magic 8 Ball. Carson seemed amused by the question, but the screen didn’t change.

“I’d say that’s a fair summary of it,” he said. “I think him an’ I the last few years have seen enough to know we don’t know everything there is to be known. And there’s certainly room for werewolves to fit in with what we do know.”

Stiles poked at the screen but it didn’t do anything else new. He considered the doctor’s request carefully even though he didn’t exactly have anything to go home to in a hurry. He was still wary of the fact that he was sitting on an air force base. With a werewolf he didn’t want dead, sitting ten feet away and eavesdropping.

“What do I gotta do?” he asked finally. “If I help.”

“Not much, really. I want to run some simple blood tests. Find you a few more things like this, may be. See if ye can get them up and running when we haven’t yet,” said Carson. “For all we know, it’s a fluke that this one likes ye. But if not, well, mebe we can better narrow down the reason ye unlocked the bit of code ye did.”

Stiles was insanely curious, though no less cautious.

“What about Derek?”

“What about him?”

“Can he come with me?” That wasn’t what Stiles meant to ask. Derek wasn’t some security blanket. He could go wherever, and Stiles would be fine. But that’s what he asked and Stiles scrubbed at his face with his shoulder to hide the red creeping up his neck.

“Of course. It’d just be a day or so. Pop over to Colorado and then be back,” said Carson. Stiles looked a bit sideways at him for the easy dismissal.

“Yeah, but will everybody _leave him alone,_ ” he clarified. Carson seemed to catch on to what Stiles was getting at and slowly nodded.

“I’ve Colonel Carter’s orders that I would handle this little project, under my purview. You and Derek would have to stay with my team, and at least one member of security on base. But I don’t expect we would be there long. I still have to get back here to help with what John is working on, of course,” said Carson.

“A human lie detector thing?” Stiles asked.

Carson grinned and nodded. Stiles handed the tracker back to Carson, staying quiet for a considerably long time, for his usual anyway.

“If I go... can you, like... make sure I’m okay?” he asked, quiet. “Things have been weird since Derek got me out, and... I think they were drugging my food. And I don’t know how long I was gone for to start with. And Teyla said it could be bad. I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid at all, lad. We can run some tests first thing, I’ll walk you through whatever we may find. At least set you on course to talk to your doctor when you get home. If we can get some answers, it may be that you'll feel better just for knowing,” the doctor said.

All the same, Stiles felt dumb for asking. He didn’t know any of the people who had shown up to drag him off by helicopter that day. They were all adults, and he wasn’t working on a great track record with anyone over the age of twenty-one lately. The _Stranger Danger_ warning lights were very brightly lit in his brain.

But Stiles knew exactly what waited for him back in Beacon Hills, and if he couldn’t even think about it without suffering panic, there was no way he could go back and face it. Not yet.

If Carson was telling the truth, it bought him a few more days to get his head clear so he could focus better on not becoming an Alpha chew toy. Maybe reality was telling him that doing experiments for the military’s weird biotech toys was the survivable lesser evil to going home.

Derek didn’t have anything against going along with Carson’s request, because it would help Stiles, but he wasn’t exactly comfortable with it. He said he trusted Carson, hadn’t heard him lie once, but it was the military that the man worked for that he expected trouble from. It wasn’t exactly a fight they could win if they got cornered. But neither were the Alphas, and Derek had actual scars from them to prove it.

And so it was that, an hour later, Stiles found himself on a military Learjet, bound for Colorado. Stiles had never been to Colorado. Or on a Learjet. Teyla had never been on one until that morning, she said, and Stiles was inclined to believe her.

Stiles fell asleep on the plane, slumped on Derek’s shoulder. It was hardly a nap, just enough to remind him that breathing hurt with bruised ribs, and that he needed to drink more water. Somebody had poured sand in his eyes as he slept, just to make the world a little more difficult.

It was still the middle of the night when they landed, so Stiles couldn’t see much of the drive between the airstrip and the base. It was a winding road with a lot of trees. The base, however, was a cave. A massive complex built inside of a mountain. It was alive with activity, people moving around everywhere, completely oblivious to the fact that it was time for everyone to be asleep.

The very first place they went to was the infirmary and it was obviously Carson Beckett’s preferred space. There was an entire section of computers and technological whatsits, and Carson traded his grubby fishing vest with the pockets for a white coat out of apparent habit as he rambled on about starting basic tests.

He sat Stiles on a gurney and directed Derek to a chair nearby so he didn’t “hover.” Colonel Carter supervised from the doorway.

“Dr. Beckett, I sent Teyla and Ronon to the mess to bring back real food. I expect you three to take a break when they get here...” Carter said. It was welcome news even if it was an order. Carson waved it off.

“Oh, yes. Of course. This won’t take a minute,” he assured her.

It actually took more like forty of them, but Stiles finally got a plate full of real, hot food, and none of it was drugged. Ronon stole a piece of bacon off one of the trays just to prove it. But probably also to piss off Derek; Stiles was pretty sure that Derek and Ronon weren’t going to get along very well. Which was especially _great_ because he had appointed himself their babysitter on base, hovering in the room with Carson but far enough away so that his friend wouldn’t notice. The doctor was too distracted fighting with computers and lab equipment that didn’t want to cooperate at no-o'clock in the morning.

When Carson was done poking Stiles with needles and taking saliva swabs, and the computers were humming away at processing and separating and quantifying codes out of samples, the doctor gave them the all-clear to go sleep. Sleep seemed like an excellent idea to Stiles. Ronon waved them toward the door, a completely redundant host because they still had the base-assigned, armed, military dude with the radios and the gear and the cammo whose entire job for the day was to watch over Derek, specifically. Derek just pretended not to notice and herded Stiles out into the hall.

“You tired?” Ronon asked them as they walked.

“Yes,” said Stiles.

“I’m fine,” said Derek.

“Good,” replied Ronon. He caught Stiles’ arm to pull him down another corridor, just enough to make sure he followed the change in direction. The guard trailed behind, apparently only supposed to watch over them, not make sure they arrived anywhere.

Where they ended up looked like a gym training room. Padded mats on the floor and along one wall. One end of the room had weights and a bench. Practice staffs and other mock weapons on a rack. Oh _god_.

“Let’s go,” said Ronon. He picked up a pair of short staffs and pointed the ends at Derek, just to make it annoyingly clear who he was calling out.

“Oh come on...” Stiles complained. “Carson promised nobody would-”

“Spar?” cut in Ronon with a shrug. “It’s good for you.” The man paused, reconsidered his words, and then nodded toward Derek. “Well, not you. But him. This place is just a tiny box. Gotta use up energy or bad things happen.”

He probably had a point but that was intentionally and entirely besides the point. Stiles looked to Derek and saw his friend was obviously considering it. “Oh my god. You’re insane. You know that? Gone.”

“Go sit down then, Stiles,” replied Derek.

“Oh, fuck off, Derek,” returned Stiles. As the two adrenaline junkies started to pace each other and stretch in their macho manly bullheaded ways, Stiles marched up to their babysitter with the automatic weapons and the handcuffs on his belt.

“Are you gonna make them stop?” he asked.

“Why? It’s just sparring,” the man replied. Stiles rolled his eyes.

“Fine. Then go out there and don’t let anybody in. Sparring is how idiots get hurt if they get in the way,” Stiles told him. The sergeant reconsidered.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean my friend is stronger than he looks, and he likes to _throw things_. If somebody walks in, they might get _hurt_ ,” Stiles insisted. And that was the best defense Stiles had, so if the guy didn’t buy it then Derek would have to keep himself from shifting and that was on his own head. In a military base. Where they probably kept people as lab rats for lesser crimes than being a _werewolf_. Thankfully it must have been logical enough of a warning and the sergeant retreated to do his job from a safer distance.

Stiles made his way over to a stack of extra padded mats across the room. Derek had found his own pair of fighting sticks and took an experimental swing at Ronon. The big man sidestepped, lazy about it. He was grinning like a crazy man. Derek was focused. Stiles wasn’t sure who to bet on because his friend tended to lose fights against crazy people.

“There’s cameras in here,” Ronon offered up, pointing Derek’s attention to a corner with a round glass bubble installed high up. “So no cheating. You’ll get us both in trouble.”

“Cheating?” asked Derek. He took another test hit, Ronon blocking it away without even trying.

“McKay says you can shift. _That’s_ cheating,” said Ronon.

“Did you consider maybe he was seeing things? He’s sick enough, right?” replied Derek.

“Ha ha,” said Ronon. He took a fast swipe at Derek’s head with a pole half as tall as Stiles but it didn’t catch. “He knew what he saw.”

“Well, he’s not gonna see it again,” said Derek.

“Good answer,” said Ronon. The man used distraction tactics like a magician, testing Derek’s responses rather than engaging, giving him multiple directions to look in at once without actually attacking. Derek wasn’t as good with the poles as Ronon was, much more accustomed to using fangs and claws.

“Hold up!” Stiles called over from the safety of the wall. “If he’s gotta be handicapped, what’s yours? Now _you’re_ the one cheating.”

Ronon shrugged at the accusation. “Fine.”

The man tossed one pole away and tucked his arm behind his back. Stiles was just guessing, but that didn’t seem like a fair accommodation. Derek didn’t complain about it.

The two stopped bullshitting at each other and actually started fighting after that. The sticks were loud and even when somebody did take a hit to the thigh or back it echoed in the metal room. Ronon had the advantage of height, size, and experience, but Derek could wait him out with endurance, strength, and the handy healing trick. They fought for over twenty minutes without losing any speed at all, blow after blow with the sticks.

Ronon got frustrated when none of the hits he got in seemed to make any kind of impact and he actually moved in enough to take the staff upside Derek's head, followed through with his elbow like he needed to verify contact. It split Derek's lip and caused a gash over his eyebrow. And then it healed a minute later while they were squared off at a farther distance because Derek wasn't going to let him cheat again.

"Knew McKay wasn't crazy," Ronon said. He had a cut across his cheek by then that was definitely not healing as quick as Derek's had. Slouched against the wall, Stiles crossed his arms and scowled at Derek taking the bait as he had, and at the proof that he had lost the bet that Ronon was some kind of shifter.

Derek snuck in a blow as Ronon gloated, sweeping in at his knees to take the bigger man down. He flipped back to his feet as nimble as Derek could, but he stumbled on the knee that had been hit. Derek backed off, adrenaline up, and tired, but not far enough gone that he wanted to get in trouble for breaking the man's leg.

Ronon waved him on. "Nope. Don't back off."

"You're hurt," said Derek.

"I'll walk it off," replied Ronon. "Don't give up an advantage like that in the field. It's how you get dead."

"We're not in the _field_ ," Derek said. He looked confused but he stepped in to bring both sticks across Ronon's shoulder, just to fake something. Ronon caught the move and managed to disarm Derek of one of the poles at the same time, without so much as flinching. He tossed the conquered weapon off the mats with the other one, grinning smug.

"Maybe not, but if the kid's as good with the Ancient tech as it sounds, I bet you will be. And soon."

Derek backed off, risking a look at Stiles that Ronon actually didn't exploit. Stiles jumped down from the mats to move closer. He could hear them fine but he didn't want to raise his voice.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked.

"We need people like you on Atlantis. Every time Sheppard finds people who can help the city, he lets them stay. _You_... could help," said Ronon. He taunted Derek with another feigned attack and Derek swatted it away. He was distracted now, mentally backed off from the sparring fight.

"Atlantis?" he asked. Ronon smiled the wolfish grin that looked equal parts charming as dangerous. He held his arms out and waved a hand at the room around them.

"What? You think _I'm_ from _here_?" he asked.

"Atlantis, though? Really?" asked Stiles. "Like, the city that disappeared. That's what you mean?"

He moved into the fighting range between the two men without realizing it, but Derek did. He dropped the remaining staff at his feet, his way of calling a draw at the interference. Ronon sighed and did the same, tossing the staff away.

"That tracker was from Atlantis. The whole city is like that. Only people with the gene can get her to work. And these idiots sent a whole expedition out there, _hundreds_ of people, so they need all the help they can get to keep her cooperating with everybody." Ronon shrugged. "If the tracker likes you, the city'll love you."

"It's a city... cities don't love people," said Derek, rationally.

"Ask Sheppard. He calls it a her. He's been able to do more with the city so far than anybody," replied Ronon.

"Sheppard didn't say anything about it to me," said Stiles. Ronon didn't seem surprised.

"And if anybody asks me, I'm not gonna say I did, either," he told them. "But I figured you could ask 'em about it if you wanted to know."

"Oh crap," said Stiles, suddenly catching on. He was caught up in classified stuff. Off the books stuff. The reason the G-men spent two hundred bucks whenever they bought a hammer, kind of stuff.

"Relax. You'll be fine. Beckett's good," said Ronon. "Whatever you worked out with him, he'll make sure they follow. He keeps his word."

"He can't lie for shit," added Derek, looking to Stiles again. "I didn't hear him lie to you. Maybe he's trying to keep you out of it."

"Sheppard has to be on board with anything that happens with the city from here, and right now he's out of commission. The doc won't say anything about it to him until he knows something," Ronon said. Stiles shook his head.

"Sheppard knows I could work the life signs thing better than him," he said. Ronon broke out in another laughing grin.

" _Better_ than Sheppard?"

Stiles nodded. "Carson said nobody else could unlock the code that way, whatever that means."

Ronon shook his head. "Kid. If you've got nowhere else to go, I think you just got options. A whole city of 'em."

More options was probably the last thing Stiles wanted just then when he didn't know what to do with the shitty options he currently had to choose between. Derek caught at the side of his shirt, a little tug to remind him to keep standing.

"We're done here. He needs to sleep," said Derek. Ronon was watching him carefully too and nodded.

"Beckett's gonna be pissed if he doesn't," he replied.

"Oh, _now_ you consider that?" Stiles asked the both of them, annoyed. "Not a half hour ago when I voted to sleep?"

Ronon ushered them to the door, not at all bothered. "I told you. He needed to get that out of his system so there weren't any problems."

" _He_ did. Right," muttered Stiles. He kept his opinions to himself though, too tired and cranky now to care.

They followed the sergeant to the guest quarters and Derek invited himself into the one Stiles had been assigned. The plan was that they weren't going to split up, and that seemed to be especially important with the new news about expeditions to Atlantis. Even if it meant cramming their stinky selves into one bed.

The bed was just barely big enough. And Stiles curled into Derek's side, falling into an actual, real sleep with the help of his werewolf babysitter pulling pain from his aching ribs.

*~*~*


	18. Chapter 18

**Earth: Beale AFB, California**

It was dark out when Rodney woke up. He didn’t remember passing out, but he was certain it had still been daylight. Now the room he was in was dark, except a light over his head, and the illuminated screens of various hospital monitors. Thank god they were quiet because his head throbbed every time he took a breath.

Also, he was hungry. Did they starve people in hospitals on Earth now? Could he just order up from the cafeteria?

He was unfortunately awake. Very carefully, Rodney started trying to take inventory. He didn’t even know for certain where he was, but there was an open window in the room so he knew it wasn’t the SGC. Looking around, he realized there was another patient bed in the room.

Sprawled across it, boots and all, was the messy haired Colonel Sheppard. Normal people got bedhead, Sheppard’s hair just flattened out like it slept when he did. What even was that man, anyway?

For the second time in as many days, Rodney found himself attempting to wake John up, in a place he was fairly certain the man wasn’t supposed to be at all, let alone sleeping in. And he very clearly remembered being yelled at about not yelling, so he tried to be quiet about trying to wake him up. It didn’t work out very well.

On second thought, maybe Rodney wanted to let the colonel sleep. Wasn’t there something about werewolves he should be more worried about?

“Damnit, John. You had better have passed that assessment, because I am not doing that... whatever it was, again,” Rodney informed him as his friend snored into the pillow. He poked gingerly at the bandage over his forehead. “I’m too old to come back to Earth and get shot at. I’ve just decided this. It’s one thing up there. Gravity is nicer almost anywhere else. This... is tiring.”

As if to prove it, John slept on. The colonel was out of it, like he was catching up on a month of sleep in one night. _Great_. That left the nurse’ station as a source of assistance. And where the hell was Carson, anyway? Rodney reached for what he assumed was the pager, getting nauseous briefly before he settled back against the raised head of the bed.

The nurse showed up presently, checked him over, and asked a dozen questions. The only one Rodney really cared about was the one related to his appetite, as he was hungry and wanted dinner delivered. The nurse didn’t give any indication that death was imminent, overall, so Rodney considered the checkup a success otherwise.

“I’ll have Dr. Dalley paged,” the nurse said as she was leaving.

“What- No, Dr. Beckett. Carson Beckett...”

“Dr. Beckett had to take his patients to another facility. They left last night,” the nurse replied, paused in the doorway.

“Last night?” Rodney stared, jaw slack. Carson had just left them there?

“Yessir. It’s morning now,” she said. “Oh-five-thirty.”

“Oh.” Rodney let the nurse leave and stared at the window. Sunrise would be due shortly, but everything outside was still lit up like it was midnight.

And despite his back and forth with the nurse, John was still passed out.

Rodney squinted over at him. “Can you zone out in your sleep? Is that what this is? Remind me to ask Sandburg. Whenever you wake up.”

No response. Rodney gave up expecting one. They slept less on Atlantis, so Sheppard was probably just being lazy. It wasn’t like _he_ had been shot in the head and poisoned on their hiking trip, _oh no_. That was Rodney’s reward for helping out, taking one for the team back on Earth. Where there were _werewolves_ now.

McKay’s head hurt, he was hungry, he was awake, and he was bored. He looked around the room for something to throw at Sheppard. What he found was a thick paperback, nondescript-looking book sitting on the rolling table just barely in reach. Sandburg’s book on Sentinel stuff. And Rodney had been promised there would be science.

Being very careful not to move his aching cranium more than absolutely necessary, Rodney inched the book close enough that he could grab it.

And then Rodney squinted through a headache to read about ancient multicultural instances across the globe of the tribal guardians with enhanced senses who had protected their communities, sorting through anthropologic voodoo quackery that was probably left over from Sandburg’s original thesis. And then came the expanded relevance of modern day warfare and human sensory recognition that was thus far still faster and more accurate than technological solutions, from explosives detection to weaponized aerosol attacks.

It was mostly all case study and statistics, but Rodney had to admit that the introduction was the summary built to suit the impatient attention spans of the military brass and the political money-movers. They liked case studies and statistics because they didn’t like science. Less than fifteen pages in and Rodney was having to convince himself not to hold the intended audience against Sandburg’s intelligence.

When the door opened somewhere around page twelve, Rodney grumbled at the intrusion. “Now what?”

The main light in the room was switched on and the nurse from earlier accompanied some new doctor Rodney didn’t remember meeting before.

“What about breakfast?” McKay asked the nurse, not expecting nor receiving an answer. The doctor instead offered a smarmy, tired smile.

“Dr. McKay, I’m Dr. Dalley. I wanted to check you over before we try adding solid foods...”

“Why? It went into the bloodstream, not my stomach. Ticker’s still ticking, right?” Rodney complained.

“Yes, and your head is still hurting, and we’ll need to check the blood work results again,” Dalley replied, apparently used to cranky patients. Rodney sighed, annoyed, and set the book down on the bed beside him so it wouldn’t wander off. The military doctor wasn’t Carson and was therefore incompetant, but Carson had left him there so McKay would have to accept the lumps he was served. Dalley carefully removed the bandage on Rodney’s forehead to investigate the wound. Rodney was in for more pokes and prods and checking for color that Rodney couldn’t see.

“I was wondering why that bed had been marked off,” the doctor said, his eyes glancing over at the occupied patient bed across from Rodney’s as he disposed of the bandage. Because of course McKay would get the chatty doctor who wasn’t Carson. “He’s yours then?”

The odd question was asked so casually that it took Rodney a few extra seconds to actually process. “What? What’s mine?”

“Looks like he’s a Sentinel, and the front desk marked the bed as in use. Are you the Guide? It’s not on your chart,” the doctor clarified. The book by Rodney’s hand probably didn’t help the man’s poor deductive reasoning skills, either.

“No, he’s the CO of my post,” said McKay, defensive. “He’s new to that whole Project.”

“Ah. I assumed. Usually the hospital isn’t a hotel unless there’s an injured team. The desk makes exceptions for that.” It was probably supposed to be a joke but Rodney wasn’t feeling very amused.

“Sgt. Porter made a note that Dr. Sandburg with the Sentinel Project made the request to be moved,” said the helpful nurse at the end of the bed. “It’s only for the next few hours.”

“Ah. Always interesting when that group shows up,” said Dalley. He had moved on to listening to Rodney’s various insides with the stethoscope but that didn’t make him any less annoying.

“How many Sentinel teams have you seen?” he asked.

“Depends on the station. More the last few years, certainly,” said the doctor. “Mostly with the Marines. I thankfully haven’t treated many. The teams get belligerent. Had an attending get her nose broken for trying to tell a Sentinel he had to wait outside during a Guide’s pre-op once.”

“Oh.” Maybe the man had a reason to ask that wasn’t just being a nosy jerk about a tattoo.

“And if he’s not stable, it makes sense they’d ask to leave him here. Where’s his Guide?” the doctor went on. Rodney didn’t even know if it was an invasive question or not. Feeling ignorant was McKay’s least favorite thing on any planet, which just compounded his defensiveness exponentially.

“He doesn’t have one,” Rodney said, shortly. “Like _I_ don’t have any breakfast. And I’m hungry. Have I mentioned that? I’m sure I have.”

Dr. Dalley took his time with the further checkups, but he at least stopped talking about being some kind of armchair quarterback pro at all things Sentinel. He rebandaged the line on McKay’s forehead and promised to have a real breakfast sent up before he went off shift.

That was probably voodoo-doctor code for “ _You’ll starve to death._ ” But McKay was just glad the man was not going to be coming back. It wasn’t like they would make him stay there too much longer just for a headache. Rodney could pop a couple of Tylenol and be home-free. Coffee would help. He was getting twitchy.

In the meantime, he went back to reading. He listened close every so often to be sure John was still breathing but otherwise let the man sleep since he hadn’t so much as moved a muscle the whole time the doctor and nurse had been talking in the room.

It wasn’t until breakfast showed up that Sheppard showed any real signs of life. That figured.

Thankfully the orderly who brought in the meal for Rodney also left a tray for John on his bed table. There would be no benevolent sharing. It was bad enough that Rodney was voluntarily reading an anthropological report for the man; sacrifices had already been made and breakfast would not be one of them.

“Hey,” came Sheppard’s groggy voice eventually. The man pushed himself to sit up, disheveled and looking like he was still half asleep. Rodney stared a moment, more surprised than amused. That wasn’t the usual ‘just woke up’ response from John when they were out on missions, or even when they had been stuck together in the infirmary for a week.

“Are you okay?” he asked the man who was just barely not a mop-headed zombie. Sheppard paused to take stock before nodding.

“Yeah. I guess I was tired,” he said. He spied the food in front of Rodney then and the sleepy eyes woke up a little more. He sat on the edge of the bed, intent on investigation of what he could clearly smell, but Rodney pointed his attention quickly to the tray behind John’s own bed.

“Yours is over there,” he informed him. The tray was retrieved in a flash and John Sheppard and his messy hair sat on the edge of the bed and ate breakfast like a kid parked in front of the TV for saturday morning cartoons. Apparently he had caught up on his sleep well enough.

“So what’s the call? Are you going to live or what?” Sheppard asked between bites. “You seem normal. Except for the-” he waved toward his own forehead to indicate the bandage on Rodney’s.

“Now that I’ve been allowed food, I’m fine,” said Rodney. “I don’t know why Carson left us here to them. I don’t think he would have signed off on care he knew would withhold meals.”

“Good bet he wouldn’t, yeah,” said John with a frown. “I’ll find Teyla in a bit. See where she stashed your pack.”

The ready meals would be a welcome fallback but there was a problem with John’s plan. “The nurse said Carson took everybody back to the SGC. Or at least, it was inferred. They didn’t check with you first?”

Sheppard finished chewing his food as he processed the news, then shook his head. “Sandburg sent me to a time-out for snapping at Ellison. Carson was here for a minute, but I passed out."

“What? Why would you - you do realize you need their help, right? Don’t piss off the Sentinel team. It’s the only one you’re gonna get and you’re not home yet,” Rodney scolded. John smirked at him.

“Do you ever, just, listen to yourself, McKay? Like, just for the sake of, I dunno, science or something?” he taunted.

Rodney frowned at him. “You’re less of a pain in the ass when you’re sleep-deprived, I think.”

John nodded. “Probably.”

“But seriously. I mean it. Don’t,” Rodney added. Again, John bobbed his head and shrugged it off.

“Yeah, I know. I was just strung out I think. And he was pushing buttons. We got into it worse out in the woods and we were fine afterward, though. I think it’s just... new team stuff. It’ll work out.”

“Did you pass whatever the test was?” asked Rodney. He doubted it greatly. John shrugged.

“I found _you_ at least,” he said. He brightened. “And that kid Stiles you found? Gene carrier. He could work an SGC LSD Carson snuck out.”

“Well, that’s nice, but that wasn’t exactly the _objective_ , was it?” Rodney blinked as he tried to process the information. “And also, there’s the subject of werewolves.”

“Derek’s fine. He healed right up. Stiles didn’t. That’s probably what Carson’s up to. Wherever he took everybody,” reasoned John.

“Okay, John, but werewolves aren’t real, so I need a better explanation,” said Rodney.

“Why not? Wraith got bit by bugs and the species evolved, so... the same thing happens everywhere. The same rules apply on Earth, we just... had different bugs. Who knows.” Sheppard shook his head, obviously judging Rodney’s refusal to accept what he had seen with his own eyes. And Rodney had certainly seen it with his own eyes. But he couldn’t _explain_ it, and that was the problem.

“But the models...”

“Were wrong,” replied John. “It _happens_. You’ll be okay, Rodney.”

Rather than be placated and mocked by a MENSA-qualified flyboy, Rodney turned his attention back to his breakfast. He had the book propped open on the other side of the tray and multitasked as he read, John firmly on ignore.

Not long later there was a knock on the door. Sheppard was paying attention to it, so Rodney didn’t have to.

“Hello?” came Blair Sandburg’s voice. At least it wasn’t another doctor.

“Hey,” greeted Sheppard. His tray was promptly put away on the rolling table behind him again but Rodney carried on, piecing at what was left of the hospital’s tater-tot version of hashbrowns.

“I thought you said there was science in this,” Rodney said in lieu of a more customary welcome. Blair walked in the room then, followed by Jim Ellison, which wasn’t a surprise at all.

“There’s science in there, I just had to bury it so I didn’t scare away the bureaucrats,” Blair assured him. Rodney nodded.

“I suspected as much.”

“So how are you today?” Blair asked, tentative as he took a chair not far away. He still had a bandage over his arm but seemed alright himself.

“Headache, but fine. The doctor is a moron,” said Rodney without looking up from the book. “Where did Carson go?”

“Uh. Back to the SGC. He needed to run some tests on the kids and wasn’t willing to risk it here,” said Blair. “Colonel Carter said they’ll catch up in a day or two. Depending on what Stiles and Derek decide.”

“ _Decide_?” Rodney looked up, confused. “They’re _kids_.”

Blair nodded. “Kids, sure. And Stiles’ foster-family sent _hunters_ after him when they knew he was already a mess. And Carson kinda explained the gene-thing to us. So all in all, nobody wants to send him back anymore than he wants to go. Colonel Carter had some ideas.”

“But what about John’s thing?” asked Rodney. He had obviously slept through a lot.

“That’s going to depend on you,” said Ellison.

“Oh _come on_ ,” complained John, like this was a return to an old conversation for them. “Is this because I snapped at you yesterday? I was _tired_ -”

“How’d you sleep?” Jim asked rather than answer. John held out his arms as though to illustrate his excessive amount of obnoxious energy.

“Great! I’m fine now. Yesterday kicked my ass, like you said it would,” said Sheppard. “All clear now.”

“When’s the _last time_ you slept _great_?” Jim pressed. “I’m gonna guess about a month ago, from Carson’s notes.”

Rodney looked over at John in time to see the color fade from his friend’s face.

“Well. Maybe?”

“Look. Guys... There’s a pattern here. And if we gotta keep working _around it_ instead of with it, this is going to take _forever_ , okay? Just... ages,” Blair said. Sheppard slumped a little where he sat, scrubbed at his face in apparent frustration.

“I don’t want one,” he muttered into his hands. Rodney looked between the three of them, confused.

“What-”

“It’s not important,” said John rather than answer anything useful.

“Yeah, it kind of is,” replied Blair. “You’re tuned into him, and I think you know it. It’s not going to work if he doesn’t know what to _do_ with that.”

John scowled at the wall rather than look at anyone. Rodney stalled out, blaming the pain in his head for his lack of ability to comprehend something that obviously made sense to Sheppard and everyone else in the room.

“Wait. _Who_ him? _Me_ , him?” he asked.

“Yeah, Rodney,” replied Blair. “Believe it or not, John’s senses are more stable with you around. Even Carson noted it a month ago.”

“The - the Guide thing?”

“Yeah. That thing,” said John. He didn’t sound happy about it. Rodney looked from John to Ellison and Sandburg.

“Don’t you have to, like, sign up for that? Some kind of... application approval process. Or... or pre-requisite qualifications...” Like not freaking out every time he had to fire a gun would probably be a good one for someone like John Sheppard to expect from a ‘ _Guide_.’

“Prerequisite prison planet, maybe,” said Jim. John looked somehow worse suddenly when Ellison nodded toward him. “From what he said yesterday, you were around when he came online. May even be the _reason_ he came online at all. He was helping protect you, tracking you when his senses were still ramping up. It’s as simple as that.”

“You didn’t know it, maybe, but you were working together on this thing before you even knew it was a thing,” added Blair.

“But... Ronon was there. He at least makes sense-”

“Ronon could take care of himself,” John offered up, quiet. Rodney looked over at him, not sure what to make of the news the others were breaking down for him. He didn’t seem angry about it, but he definitely wasn’t surprised by it, either.

“Did _you_ know?” McKay asked.

“Not until people started pointing it out,” John said. He shook his head. “Even Teyla called me out yesterday. It’s apparently obvious.”

“ _Blindingly_ ,” said Ellison. John rolled his eyes.

“Okay, but you knew what to look for,” John argued lightly. “And everything around me has been just a little too intense until I got to the SGC, so I was doing the best I could with what I had.”

“It’s fine, John. But... It’s got to be sorted out before we get to the Project. Then they start shoving paperwork in your faces, and everything has to match up,” said Blair. “And it will make everything else far easier. From here on out.”

“Now hold on a minute,” said John, sitting up and reclaiming some space, maybe his pride. He pointed toward Rodney. “I think he gets a goddamn say in if he even wants the job before the Project gets involved. The _Sentinel Project Manual_ can take the rules and get stuffed.”

Rodney hesitated, remembering the manual in question clearly enough. The Sentinel and Guide were supposed to be brought into the Project at the same time for training, and there weren’t many clear allowances for if one or the other party refused. There was nothing saying the Guide had to sign on, only outlined consequences for the Sentinel if they refused. John already knew what those were, thanks to his treatment since getting back to the SGC.

“Sorry,” said Blair to Rodney then. “You guys are friends so I just assumed you would be up for it. He’s right, that’s my bad.”

“Up for _what_? If I don’t, it sounds like _he’ll_ never _sleep_ again,” said Rodney, and voicing it out loud was somehow worse than when it just rattled in his own head.

“Well, it’ll take a few months, maybe,” said Blair soberly. “I mean, we can send you back with the others and get started the same as we would otherwise. But if John came online as a trauma response, he would have to work through that before he could find a new baseline. It’s a conditioned response, a different kinda PTSD. He’d have to break the habit. He would have to get used to not looking for you. It’d mean more zone outs, maybe. And from what I’ve seen so far, a hellaciously bad attitude.”

“All of which he’ll have to start working on this week as it is,” added Ellison with a shrug. “So now would be the time to make the break, while he’s going through the adjustments anyway.”

“Well it doesn’t sound very pleasant at any rate,” replied Rodney, somewhat mortified at the sudden sense of responsibility rushing directly at his aching face. Nobody had explicitly said it, but the last month of upheaval for John and the team had been partly his fault.

“It’s not your problem,” said John quickly. “I can deal.”

“Maybe, but why the hell should you have to?” Rodney looked over at his friend. “We’re on the same team. If we were going to kill each other, I think it’s safe to say that we would have by now. I mean, _literally_.”

John cracked the barest of smiles but sobered quickly. “I swear to god I _will kill_ you if you make this mess-” He paused to wave generally toward the messed up senses around his head. “Live through another planetary destruction scheme. I will _murder_.”

“ _Another_ one?” squawked Sandburg.

“It’s a...” began Rodney with a dismissive wave even as John replied, “Long story.”

“Oh. Great. At least it wasn’t _short_.” Blair did not seem at all calmed, and Ellison crossed his arms as he propped up the nearby wall, looking no less annoyed.

“This isn’t a small thing, here. It means living on top of each other and looking out for each other,” he said, calling their attention back to the matter at hand.

“We do that anyway,” said Rodney. “Atlantis isn’t that big.”

John seemed to pale a little. “Well, it’s not that _small_ , either.”

Blair pointed from Rodney to John. “Every scrap of paper he signs, every day, has to have your countersignature. You’ll have to verify that he’s not just making up an account that relies on him seeing, hearing, smelling, or otherwise witnessing an event. _Your_ reputation goes with _his_.”

That gave Rodney a moment’s pause. Jim caught John’s attention, nodded toward Rodney. “He gets put in charge of your medical care. All of it. You get a cold, he gets CC’d on the ‘scrip for the NyQuill.”

“Also, you _really_ shouldn’t try NyQuill anytime soon, so don’t get sick,” added Blair offhand.

“What-” Rodney was suddenly back to wanting to find John a good lawyer rather than let the man anywhere near the Project.

“Drugs don’t always settle well with an elevated sensitivity,” said Blair. “So I have to make sure some idiot quack doesn’t try to put Jim on an antihistamine that will put him in an actual coma.”

“Why can’t he do that himself?” asked Rodney. Blair shrugged, not apparently bothered, and nodded toward Jim.

“If he’s already sick or injured, he may not be conscious to tell anyone. Doctors have just started asking for the Guide before they’ll even look at him.”

“Well, that’s what we’ve got Carson for,” reasoned John. “I’ll just... let _him_ know.”

“Same goes for food allergies. There can be sensitivity to new foods, they can have a reaction. Some chemical environments, like warehouse spills, or-” Blair carried on but Rodney waved him off, more than getting the picture.

“Okay, I got it,” he said. He was miserably reminded of the doctor an hour ago asking if John was _his_. “It’s a responsibility.”

“One way or another, yeah,” replied Ellison. “Seems like it goes pretty one-way at times, too. When you’re stuck living it.”

Blair shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.”

John watched Rodney, frowning. “Sorry...” he offered up. “I didn’t know.”

“Nobody did,” said Rodney. “Well, maybe _Carson_ knew some of the doctor-stuff.”

“I’ve been living on a bland diet for a month,” scoffed John. “Oh yeah. _He_ knew.”

"Well, the idea is to make sure your team knows how to keep you from the problem spots, eventually. If it takes a village, so be it," said Blair. "But think on the Guide thing for a while. It changes the game. And by the time we head down south, we need to know how to proceed."

“Right...” Rodney attempted to sit up and was suddenly nauseous all over again, this time with food on his stomach making the threat a little more imminent. “Woah.”

“You two stay here for now,” said Ellison, pointing between Blair and Rodney. “I can still smell that stuff on him, so I’m sure you’re not much better. You can wait here until it’s medically cleared and out of your system.”

“You said that last night, too.” John blinked a little, side-eyeing Ellison on the Sentinel senses trick. “You can smell him? Like, on purpose?”

“You can smell _everyone_ , you just start to process what the normal is and ignore it unless it changes,” said Jim.

“I’d rather just ignore it _all the time_ ,” replied John, not at all enthusiastic about apparently superhuman sniffing skills. Rodney took a self-conscious whiff of himself and figured he could understand the reluctance. It did nothing to help his queasy stomach, but it wasn’t exactly his fault that he hadn’t showered in a couple of days, either.

“How’d you know he’d been poisoned on the chopper?” Jim asked Sheppard. John shrugged at the question.

“I could smell something that wasn’t blood on the rag,” he said. Jim nodded. “And there was this weird white color around the cut.”

“Because you know what blood smells like, so the toxin that made it wrong stood out. Practice and familiarity. Same thing with... everything else. From odor to the color of their skin. You pick it up, you just have to know to pay attention to it,” Ellison replied. John sobered in his complaining, but he still didn’t look happy about the responsibility. He wasn’t any kind of a doctor, so it wasn’t something he signed up for, either. The list of _Things Nobody Signed Up For_ just seemed to keep growing.

Ellison waved John off the bed, snapped his fingers to hint at speeding up the response pace. “Come on. Up. Time to work.”

Sheppard looked offended for a moment before he grudgingly got up to follow Ellison. “Just don’t make me start sniffing bodily fluids in a _hospital_. I’ll tell Carter.”

“Oh, yeah?” asked Ellison, sounding almost amused but the man was hard to read. “Where’d _you_ get the radio?”

“...fuck.”

The door shut behind them then and Rodney couldn’t hear the two anymore. He looked to Blair and the man shrugged.

“I promise, they won’t kill each other,” he said. Rodney nodded acceptance of that but then stopped as he waited for his head to stop throbbing again.

*~*~*


	19. Chapter 19

Despite the threats, Ellison didn’t make Sheppard sniff his way around the hospital. They went outside again. The captain made him run off some of the energy, which was only annoying because the man was at least ten years older than John and still could have run circles around him after about a mile.

“You sound terrible,” Ellison observed, smug more than concerned.

“ _Temporary_ setback. I’ll kick your ass _next_ week,” John promised.

“Not looking likely, boss,” replied the Sentinel.

Sheppard shook his head. “I’ve been on lockdown for a month, remember? I kinda didn’t have many places I could go that weren’t reactive to my existence,” he said. “So Carson just abused his power and revoked _everything_. If it couldn’t happen in my quarters or the gym, it didn’t.”

“That’s why you’re just in general screwed up,” said Jim. “If you’re not out in it, you can’t adjust to it.”

“Well, yeah, we know that _now_ ,” replied Sheppard. “But some of it might just be... where I was, too. Everything was more intense back home, and on the ship. I can focus here. Back there, it was impossible.”

Talking and running wasn’t working and John figured he was capable of deciding when he was done, so he slowed to a jog. Ellison made it a point to come back to him rather than wait for him to keep up.

“So when you say ‘ _on the ship_ ’...” Jim said, prompting but not asking. They were on a base instead of in the woods, surrounded by open space and a few trucks and fighter jets out on the tarmac. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do. John took the excuse to stop moving altogether and stood facing Ellison so he could keep his voice down.

“ _Not_ talking an ocean cruise,” he confirmed. “I was on the _Daedalus_. A tidy little battlecruiser we kinda borrowed from people a helluva lot smarter than us for interstellar travel between Earth and Atlantis. Where you’ll be stationed, as soon as I’m cleared to get off this rock.”

Sheppard was inwardly cringing, maybe a little, because he remembered clearly enough his own reaction to being told off by a bunch of military science geeks telling him not to touch anything and then yelling at him for screwing it up, and that was with visual _proof_ in front of his face. Sheppard wasn’t offering any proof, only words and vague concepts, which probably looked a lot different in reality than whatever somebody like Ellison would have in their head. Ellison went from taking a nice jog to finding out he was about to be a whole new kind of astronaut, so John figured the man might be needing to take a seat.

“Interstellar-” Jim’s voice didn’t make it through whatever he was getting at, so John just took a guess and nodded.

“You want more, or would you rather read the project briefs and field reports when we’ve got some time to kill?” he asked.

“Just... _wait_.” Jim waved a hand like he could get up in Time’s face and make the world stop for a minute. “Atlantis?”

“Yeah. _That_ Atlantis,” said John. “The one that disappeared from Earth to escape a - let’s say a _less-than-natural_ disaster. Atlantis is a city-ship. And she’s currently settled in at home in the Pegasus galaxy. Where there’s a lot of planets that look a lot like this one. And people that look a lot like us.”

Jim stood there for nearly a full minute and John started to wonder on the possibility of a zone out but the guy moved his head and looked around, despite the look of mild distress. He was just processing. John was fine waiting him out, but he started to get a _goddamned cramp_ in his low back above an old injury and had to move. He made a mental note to kill Carson later and crouched to stretch it out.

“So the... werewolf kid?” Ellison asked.

John glanced up at him. “I watched him heal up from an arrow wound in a few seconds, flat. And I can guarantee that he is, like, not even in the top ten most unbelievable, gross, weird, _whatever_ things I’ve seen in the last few years.” He stood up again, lightly shaking off the stretch. “It was actually kind of cool. Sparks and shit. I wish I could do it. It would hurt a lot less than getting my ass kicked by Ronon every day, I’d bet.”

“So _he_ came with your team, right?”

“No. He’s American. Earth kid. That’s not us,” said John. He realized what he said and then shook his head, frustrated. “Well, I mean, he’s _Earth_ us. Not from Atlantis. The kid had an attitude, but he seemed legit.”

“But he’s _normal_ there?”

“No. Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent of everyone we’ve met has been just like us. Human. I mean, I never asked for percentages I guess, but they’re at least _mostly_ human. They catch colds and the whole nine yards. For everything that counts, they’re like us,” John said. He saw the struggle and realized Jim wasn’t quite wrapping his head around it.

“The people we deal with, it’s to trade for food or supplies for the city. It’s like the wild west all over again, trying to sort through the colonies and the tribes and find that some are friendly and some aren’t. We just try to keep our little boat above water and let everybody do their own thing most of the time, unless it starts making waves.”

Ellison seemed to be listening. His heart rate settled down again. John chanced reaching out, clapping the captain’s arm encouragingly.

“It sounds crazier than it is, I promise,” he said, as sober as possible. “I mean, you’ve met my team. Carson’s a pretty grounded guy, right? And McKay’s the kind of nerd who should never be let out of his mother’s basement, but he’s out there with me, every damn mission. So far... he’s only blown up one solar system, and he’s on _our_ side.”

The man seemed understandably unsettled by that. “Destroying solar systems generally makes us the _bad_ guys.”

Sheppard frowned and scrunched his face at the very valid point. “Yeah. Until we got stuck in the mines for a couple of weeks, I was still rethinking ever talking to him again. Him and me were still _in_ that particular solar system when he started collapsing it. But it _was_ an accident.”

Jim shook a finger at him. “See, that? That kinda thing doesn’t make me feel better.”

Sheppard shrugged it off. “According to Sandburg, you don’t have to feel good about it, you just gotta show up,” he replied. It was a potentially low blow because John didn’t know the story, but he was betting it would draw Ellison back from worrying about aliens and planetary destruction. Based on the scowling grimace on the man’s face, it worked, too.

“Somebody gonna clue me in to what _that’s_ about?” John asked, not dropping it since he hadn’t been punched yet. “I told you mine, you gotta share yours, man. I’m used to dealing with contractors with a little more _free will_ than that particular policy. Sandburg sounded a little... not okay.”

“He’s fine.”

“But he’s _not_ a contractor,” pressed Sheppard.

“Not exactly,” said Ellison. He took a breath and glanced around, stretching subtly as he recovered from the slight panic a little more fully. “It’s a long story.”

“What, and you think aliens and Atlantis is a short one?” asked Sheppard. “ _Come on_. I’m the commanding military officer on a human civilian outpost on the edge of another _galaxy_ , surrounded by actual _nothing_. And they’re gonna send him along, with _my_ rank, to keep _me_ in check. I’ve got well over two hundred souls to answer for up there and I wanna know they’re not sending up a loose cannon as punishment for not getting in line. We’re a little full up on those as it is.”

“He’s working off a sentence,” Ellison finally said. “When Sandburg and I were trying to figure out this Sentinel stuff on our own, it turns out I was on _medical leave_ for ten years, when I had paperwork in my hands that said I was medically _discharged_ with honors. Somewhere along the way, someone got a hold of Sandburg’s thesis, started up the Sentinel Project, and then nailed him on selling state secrets to a book publisher out of New York.”

Sheppard watched and listened close, realizing for the first time that he hadn’t seen Ellison angry until just now. The man had a good resting-bitch-face, as the kids called it, but the scowl wasn’t _anger_. Things that messed with Blair Sandburg caused anger. And that anger sure as hell made sense.

Jim stared off at one of the planes lining up across the runway, the engines ramping up louder. John had to really lean on the dial trick to keep focused on the captain’s words, but he managed.

“I went back to active duty and Sandburg got a _diversionary_ sentence working for General Glass to start processing service members through the Sentinel Project,” Jim went on, speaking only hardly louder than usual despite the plane noise only a half a mile away. “We built the damn system almost from the ground because Glass knew shit about any of it, except that the number of soldiers with heightened senses made a lot more sense to the Brass. He wanted his machine, so he got it. And Sandburg’s got five years left on his ticket.”

Sheppard suddenly understood why his little ProX problem had caught the attention of the Sentinel Project higher-ups enough that they would be willing to send their two founding experts on the phenomena. If the Project _owned_ Sandburg, they weren’t just sending an expert, they were sending a spy. They wanted in the SGC and they wanted the field notes and they wanted Sandburg and Ellison to report back, as they had been trained according to the manual, in order to keep Sandburg out of the bowels of Leavenworth. The SGC was getting a couple of experts, and the Project was getting insider access to the inner workings of a top-most, tippy-top, top secret classification project.

“Well, shit,” John muttered, scrubbing at his face as the tension headache came roaring back. Ellison didn’t say anything but he nodded his mild agreement. They stood without speaking as the plane noises quieted down again. It gave Sheppard a chance to sort a few things out in his head.

“Okay... so. First? Don’t tell Rodney the military stole Sandburg’s stuff and used it like that. We need him to not freak out on us any time soon. And _that_... would probably do it,” John requested, genuinely afraid of Rodney McKay taking his giant brain and leaving far, far away with the rest of his toys. And probably at least a few of the science geeks on Atlantis, too, without him there to fix the things they couldn’t. John shook it off.

“Second,” he said, much more solid. “O’Neill said he would fix it. He’ll fix it.”

“There’s nothing to fix,” said Ellison. “It’s been this way for ten years. There’s nothing to be done about it. Except not make it worse. As long as Sandburg stays relevant to the Project, he stays in the field with me. If the new General wants him out, she pulls the plug and Sandburg disappears. So, we go where we’re ordered. No different than anybody else.”

“No... no, trust me, this is _a lot_ different,” said John. “I took my post voluntarily. Everyone on Atlantis is there because they wanted to go and explore the galaxy, for whatever reasons. They put up with a lot of shit to be there, and it’s important to them, somehow. That’s signing up. We’ve got more civilian contractors, from governments all over Earth, than we’ve got military personnel. Nobody is forced to be there. I don’t want anybody _suffering_ the place.”

“It’s not a prison, so Sandburg will be fine,” replied Ellison.

“Maybe, maybe not. The thing I want you, and him, to understand here is, in Atlantis, the Project can’t touch him,” said John. It was what made the most sense about O’Neill getting involved with the negotiations, with the restructuring and the organization going on outside of the Project’s reach. The man was possibly brilliant for figuring something out if he meant what he’d said in their meeting, but Sheppard knew better than to throw that word around lightly. He also knew that he trusted Jack O’Neill. Sandburg and Ellison could report back whatever they wanted, but by the time it got through Carter and O’Neill, it would be so wrapped up in red tape and black sharpies that the Project would forget Sandburg existed.

“Look, I don’t know the Project’s general, but I know O’Neill well enough. My money’s on him," said Sheppard. "Even if they decide to yank us all back here, the orders will have to go through the SGC first. And if Jack’s working on renegotiating a diversionary sentence, he’s not going to accept anything from it that could risk the Pegasus mission."

The man’s anger had backed off, but it didn’t make Sheppard feel any better to see Ellison smile dryly before looking away.

“Colonel, I get what you’re saying. Appreciate it,” Ellison said, and maybe he meant it. “But the Project still pulled _you_ back. Apparently being a galaxy away doesn’t matter. So Sandburg and I will show up. The difference is, maybe something like this, working with a city instead of under an ax, maybe it’s something we’ll actually want to do.”

Sheppard crossed his arms, refusing to think too much about the fact that Ellison had a point. At the moment he was much more comfortable hating on the organization that Ellison had apparently helped put in place, reminded of his annoyance at everything associated with the Sentinel Project that he had learned about before meeting the Sentinel team he had been assigned to. Even Rodney had called bullshit on their operation, and learning about what it had done to Blair Sandburg wasn’t going to change McKay’s mind at all.

“Well, good,” John replied, resigned but still annoyed. Partly at himself, because trying to distract Ellison from aliens had left Sheppard wanting to go home and fortify the gate. “And you’ve got a valid point. I’m not so sure I can let McKay get involved with this whole thing. If somebody went after any of his research like that, there would be _interplanetary_ problems at this point. He becomes a whole new security risk.”

“Not this again...” Ellison actually turned just enough to get in Sheppard’s face but the Lt. Colonel met the sass with some logic of his own.

“Hey, I wasn’t kidding. He blew up _planets_ by _accident_. Are you telling me the people who’d use you against Sandburg wouldn’t do the same thing to a guy who can turn damn near anything into a weapon of mass destruction?”

“Not if they’d have to go through the SGC to do it,” replied Ellison. But there had been a hesitation, a reaction. And Sheppard heard the lie in the man’s heartbeat, loud and clear.

“Nope. Too risky. He’s out.” Sheppard needed to be moving, and he suddenly needed to make sure Rodney was safe and headed back to Colorado on the next available flight path. He started walking back toward the hospital ward. Ellison followed, kept up easily.

“Bad call.”

“Too bad.”

“If he says he’s in, Sandburg’ll let him in. You’ll drag everything out for months trying to go around him when we could be gone in a week if you don’t be a pain in the ass about him anymore,” Ellison pointed out.

“I’m not being a pain in the ass about him, I’m _gonna_ be a pain in the ass about him on _their_ radar,” said Sheppard.

“You get what yesterday was about, right?” Ellison asked. “Beckett’s the one who saw it first, he put it in the file, and we had to sort it out. He’s on their radar whether he’s on your team or not.”

John stopped to face Ellison. “But McKay’s not military. He’s a contractor. An _actual_ contractor. Are you telling me they can’t go around SGC and get him through his own government?”

“No,” said the Sentinel, looking no less annoyed than John did. “I’m telling you they already would have done it. They’ve been working with O’Neill on this for, what, a week? They had the same files we did ‘cause we got ours from the Project. His people would have already been contacted for authorization when the SGC reached out in the first place. So cutting him loose doesn’t do anything but paint a bigger target on his back.”

“Obviously you set the program up too well, so that _figures_ ,” John complained. “Had to be _international_ about it.”

“Colonel, all due respect, _knock it off_ ,” said Ellison. That was at least a little surprising and Sheppard stopped the mental tirade against academic efficiency meddling in military operations as he stared at the man.

“What happened to Sandburg isn’t gonna happen to anybody else, alright? The Sentinel Project actually helps keep soldiers in their jobs. And yeah, there’s a lot of extra bullshit paperwork. But it keeps them on their feet and moving instead of drugged up with the VA passing them around blaming headaches and migraines and PTSD and all of the things that don’t help the kids get any answers. We still helped structure the rest of the Project to _take care_ of people. Good stuff actually came out of Sandburg’s work, even if some asshole stole it in the worst way possible. Glass has been dead for two years now, and good riddance. Nobody’s going to go after McKay.”

“You don’t know that,” replied Sheppard.

“Sheppard. You’re being overly _paranoid_ about this because you’re trying to protect him,” said Ellison, his words spoken painstakingly slowly in a very familiar way. Normally John pulled that tone on Rodney when the man was being extraordinarily annoying. “ _This_ is what you need to learn to work with. _This_ is part of the Guide thing. Otherwise you’re never going to be able to run a clear-eyed risk assessment on your city again.”

John had to take a physical step back to consider the man’s warning. “Wait... what?”

“Sentinel protect their people, but they _rely_ on the Guide. Everyone’s important, but that one is most important. Whatever the reason. Doesn’t matter,” said Ellison, explaining from experience without trying to dumb it down.

“And if every threat gets tossed up against the proximity it has to the Guide, the view starts to get a little skewed. A major threat is downgraded as long as the Guide is protected from it. A _papercut_ can get real important if your Guide needs a band-aid and you don’t have one on you. It’s stupid, and it’s annoying, and it’s that same instinct that hit you last night. _You knew_ he was in trouble before that gunshot, I saw you going through it. The same as I knew Blair was hurt. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s legit. And you have to be able to handle it.”

“Oh.” Sheppard blinked, feeling somehow reassured and yet distrustful of his own paranoia at the same time.

“And I’ve seen it go both ways. So _he_ has to be able to handle it, too," said Ellison. "That’s what the training’s there for, for _both_ of you. Because I sure as hell don’t want the guy going off and making a weapon of mass destruction in response to you doing something stupid and getting hurt. Stop trying to get _everybody_ killed, huh?”

“Why?” John asked, quieter and calmer, but still angry.

Ellison huffed out a dry laugh. “Why stop trying to get everybody killed?”

“No. _Why_ the Guide thing? This is a fucking detrimental _instinct_ you’re talking about, here. And I might not be a doctor in anything, but I get how genetics work. And something that changes in my coding has no way of impacting _him_. McKay didn’t even have the ATA, Beckett had to do a patch-job. Nothing about this makes sense,” John said. “And certainly not enough to justify letting him stick his neck out like that.”

“All I’ve got is theory. You want the genetics numbers, you gotta read the Dummies book,” said Ellison. “And then have McKay explain it because I tune Sandburg out every time.”

John glared at him for the attempt at humor. Any other time, maybe he could have appreciated it, but he was a little pissed off still. “I’ll take the theory. _Maybe_.”

“Sandburg’s theory is that we’re inundated with too much. We can’t keep track of our own system anymore, so we extend it out,” said Ellison. He seemed out of his depth trying to explain something finally, which Sheppard felt strangely vindicated by. The man shrugged as he struggled to narrow in on the words. “We find somebody we can keep track of, we can rely on, and we can _sense_. The whole _protect the tribe_ thing removes us from a sense of ourselves, so we find someone who reflects it back to us in a way we can pick up on.”

John tripped over that. Aside from the arrogance of it, of dragging someone into his own shit because his system had screwed up so much he couldn’t keep track of himself anymore, the fact that that particular cosmic compass arrow had landed on Rodney made no sense at all. “That’s _McKay_?”

Ellison held up his hands to stay out of it. “Hey, you want to psychoanalyze your friendships, that’s your call, man. Talk to Sandburg,”

John scowled at him for it again. “I _meant_ the gene thing. He doesn’t have the ProX or the ATA, he’s not a sentinel, so how’s it drag him into it?”

"No idea," Jim replied, honestly. "But just because they don't have some gene coding we do, it doesn't mean they don't have their own coding that reacts to it. It just means we haven't identified it yet. Because we haven't. We don't have the resources. We just have case after case that confirms it isn't a one-way thing. Another kinda pheromones."

"This is really inconvenient," John grumbled. He wasn't going to pout about it but he wanted to. Instead he started walking toward the hospital again just because Jim was right, he _had_ made himself paranoid, and he needed to be sure McKay hadn't been _disappeared_ from his doctors' care.

"So are aliens, so I guess we're even," replied Ellison.

"Oh, you don't know the half of it," said John. "I wasn't gonna tell you about the bad ones until you could read the reports yourself."

There was a silence and Ellison was likely glaring at him behind his sunglasses but John didn't care to check.

"You _still_ aren't. And don't tell Sandburg _anything_ until he can read it for himself," said Jim.

"Yeah, yeah." John dismissed it with a wave. Maybe Rodney had already told him and John would never again have to stumble his way into an Earth-conversation about aliens again.

"You done?" Ellison asked. "Because there's more training we can get to here."

Sheppard nodded acceptance but didn't change course. "In a few."

"Where are you going?" asked the captain. Sheppard went quiet, guiltily trying to find an excuse to dodge the question. He was walking, so he couldn't exactly fake a zone out to ignore it.

"Colonel?"

"Fine! I'm gonna go check on McKay," he admitted quickly. Over and done with, band-aid ripped off.

"If I hear _another damn word_ about sending him home after this..." It wasn't exactly a surprise when Ellison raised his hand and cuffed him one lightly against the back of the head. Sheppard figured that was probably fair and didn't even think to tell the man off for it.

*~*~*


	20. Chapter 20

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

When Stiles finally woke up again, he only did so because he was hungry. He had blankets, he was warm, and he slept like he had died, comfortably heavy. Everything was quiet, too, with no doors slamming, nobody yelling. He could hear a weird, ringing echo, but he figured it was just because he had gotten his ass kicked (again) the day before.

It wasn’t until he sat up and blinked at the room that he remembered why he was warm and everything was quiet. He was in an underground bunker, in Colorado somewhere. And the room he was in was small, but not exactly a closet, either. A light from a nearby tabletop lamp showed Derek sat in a comfy looking rolling office chair, reading something open on the desk.

“What time is it?” Stiles asked, somewhere around a yawn.

“Time for you to wake up,” replied Derek with the Dad Jokes. He hardly did more than glance over at Stiles. “There’s a bathroom with a shower in it. And Colonel Carter brought stuff.”

Curiosity caught, Stiles sorted out how to untangle himself from the blankets and went to investigate.

“What stuff? Like, free stuff?” he asked. Derek nodded and shifted in the chair to shove a cardboard box along the floor toward him. Stiles sat down on the edge of the bed and dug through the box content, some Wal-Mart clothes and some that looked like Air Force surplus. Even a hat and a pair of new boots.

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” agreed Derek, his nose back in the book.

“We get to keep this? Or is it just while we’re here? Did she say?” Stiles asked. He squinted at tags and figured the stuff in the box was more likely to fit him than Derek. At the bottom of the box was a folded up, flattened duffle bag.

“Keep,” was the reply from Derek.

“Cool!” Stiles pulled out clothes to wear that didn’t stink or have holes in them for the first time in actual weeks. Then he put them down and grabbed something else because he couldn’t make up his mind. Derek glanced over at him, distracted from whatever he was trying to read, and Stiles noticed Derek was wearing his own new shirt. He didn’t seem as excited at the prospect of not smelling like a walking pigpen however. Stiles’ enthusiasm fell.

“What’s the catch?” he asked.

“No catch. At least, not that she said,” Derek replied. “She said it’ll maybe be a couple of days. They didn’t want us to think we were stranded or locked up or something.”

“Then what’s wrong with it?” Stiles asked, confused by Derek’s apparent mood. It wasn’t at all meshing with the hyper Stiles had suddenly woken himself up with. Derek rolled his eyes and looked back down at the book.

“Nothing, Stiles. Pick something already and go take ten showers.”

“I might,” replied Stiles. He didn’t stick around to argue about it, either. Just kicked his muddy, creekwater-stenched shoes away from their spot under the bed to replace the boots there, and dragged the whole box with him to the bathroom.

“Are you kidding me?” he heard Derek ask as he shut the door. Stiles wasn’t kidding. He was going to get clean and then try everything. And then pack everything. And if he had to wear multiple layers in order to keep everything, he’d do that, too. But clean first.

There was a slight problem, however. His ribs were wrapped in a soft gauze to protect the burn there from the gross shirt he had been stuck in for the last two weeks. Stiles wasn’t sure if the burn was allowed to get wet or if that would mess everything up. It was definitely going to hurt, no matter what he did. He kicked the door back open and stuck his head out to ask Derek what to do. He was a few years older, he was supposed to know stuff.

Derek just stared at him. “Stiles,” he said slowly. “How the hell would I know what to do with that?”

“I mean, just.... You get hit with the light sabers all the time,” Stiles replied. Derek waited a very long minute for Stiles to actually think about what he had asked. It eventually caught up and Stiles felt the red creep up to his face.

“Oh. Right,” he said. He started to very slowly back into the bathroom again, careful of dodging the box partly blocking the door.

“Just do it anyway,” Derek told him. “You can ask Beckett later.”

Stiles’ embarrassment at having forgotten the detail that werewolves healed did put somewhat of a damper on his excitement and hyper mood. But the fact remained that having clothes that he could keep meant that he didn’t have to go back to the Argents. If he was careful with it, a week’s worth of clothes could get him through a year of avoiding the hunters entirely. Enough to get him to eighteen, when the social workers wouldn’t care where he stayed anymore. It was a very big deal in the very narrowly-focused grand-scheme of things for Stiles’ immediate future.

But he had certainly attained a whole new level of dumb being excited about it, too. Stiles climbed into the shower and tried to scrub it out of his brain.

There was plenty of hot water, but it stung, so Stiles only took two showers rather than the hoped for ten. Soap on healing claw pokes and cuts wasn’t so bad, but the black eye and the burn on his ribs weren’t fans of the overall shower experience. Stiles found the towels on the shelf over the sink and called it good enough.

When he walked out, half dressed in the new jeans and socks, he kicked the box out step at a time, lazily protective of his treasure horde. Derek raised an eyebrow at him for it.

“It’s my stuff, I’ll do what I want,” Stiles told him. Derek shook his head and went back to reading. Stiles sat back on the bed, very gingerly accommodating the sore ribs he was too chicken to attack with a towel yet. He could just air dry the top half, he figured.

“What are you reading?” he asked. It was mildly suspicious because the room had no other books in it, so Derek could be very intently reading the dictionary for all Stiles could tell.

“It’s from the stuff from Carter. Apparently Ellison and Sheppard have this thing that amps up their senses. That’s why they’re human lie-detectors. They’re Sentinels,” said Derek.

“Okay...” said Stiles. “ _Are_ they human?”

“Yes.”

“So why do _we_ care?” Stiles asked. “I mean, that’s a big book for, what, some kind of party trick. And I thought she said we’d only be here a few days?”

Derek finally closed the book and actually turned to look over at him. “But what about what Ronon said?”

Stiles scrunched his face up, scrubbed at the back of his neck with his towel. “I don’t know, man. The guy was looking to fight you all night, then he comes in talking about Atlantis like it’s some kind of alien spaceship. Maybe he was kind of _crazy_?”

“Wanting to fight doesn’t make him crazy,” said Derek.

“Uh. It kinda does,” replied Stiles. He pointed at his nowhere-near-healed ribs. “ _Normal_ people get hurt.”

“And I don’t,” said Derek. “But his friends let me come in here and stay with you. All he knew was that I healed and Rodney was hallucinating monsters. So he had to find out what kind of threat I was to his friends.”

Stiles stared at him. “Are you kidding me right now with this.”

“No. I have literally done the same thing, dozens of times,” said Derek. He waved toward the door. “I did it last night. The guy is huge and he smells weird. I don’t know what he is. But now I know I can kick his ass if I had to.”

“That’s why it’s stupid, ‘cause he knows he can kick yours,” replied Stiles. Derek shrugged at the point.

“Sure, handicapped maybe,” he said.

Stiles had to allow for that, but he didn’t like it. “Fine. You’re both crazy, but _the point_ was that doesn’t make Atlantis real.”

“Nope,” agreed Derek. He took a long breath, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to keep talking, but he did. “But we could ask and find out.”

“And get buried in the desert by the MIB?” asked Stiles.

“Or get an all expenses paid ticket away from the Alphas,” replied Derek. He waved to the small guest-quarters they were tucked away in. “Because this? They can’t find you here. They won’t even try. And the Argents won’t keep you out of the war after this. Not if they found out your dad survived.”

Stiles hadn’t factored that into his what-if scenarios yet. “Shit.”

Derek nodded. “You’re safer with Carter and Sheppard, and if what Ronon said was true, maybe they’ll give you the chance.”

“But what about my dad? I can’t just leave him-”

“I’ll find out where they went and I’ll make sure he’s okay,” said Derek. “If I can, I’ll figure something out eventually to try to get him back to normal.”

Derek sounded resolved on the suggestion, like he had been planning on it and had made his mind up to get it done. All without having once consulted Stiles about it.

“What- why?”

Derek shrugged. “Because he’s your dad? And he actually helped me out a lot after the fire. Until Scott and you kept getting me arrested for shit. Made things weird.”

“Annnnd I still don’t get it. He killed _Erica_ -”

Derek shook his head, crossed his arms as he leaned back in the chair, shutting that suggestion down. “ _Deucalion_ said he did. Doesn’t mean he did. From what they did to Boyd and Cora? Either one of them could have done it, and they wouldn’t remember. It’s just as easy to blame your dad when it means Deucalion gets a beta out of it.”

Stiles felt the impossible tight knot of panic in his chest and didn’t know what to do. “I can’t just leave him there, though.”

“That’s why I’m saying I’ll go back.”

“We said I go where you go,” said Stiles, shaking his head.

“You can’t. Stiles, if Scott had shown up at the loft when Deucalion called us out, you’d have been dead. None of us are stronger than him, and he just has to kill you to prove it. He’ll just have one of us do it. Me, or Scott, or your dad... We can’t fight it.”

“But... he’s _my dad_.”

“And he’s a beta to a powerful Alpha. He can’t stand up to the... Look, you don’t get it.” Derek broke off, frustrated. He tried to back up and drag Stiles along with him. “The Alpha can force their will on their pack, that’s their power. You saw Scott when Peter tried to bring him in as pack, remember? And Scott fought Peter off because he was too weak to control it. Now, Scott can almost do it, and since you left, he's got Boyd and Cora and Isaac backing him, so he's stronger, okay? Deucalion wants to own that power. And Deucalion is strong enough to control it, he just has to weaken Scott for a _minute_ and he can move in."

"So? Scott can screw off all he wants. My dad won't hurt me," said Stiles, not understanding. He had watched Scott shake off Peter's attempts at controlling his mind, damaged or not, so he knew it was possible. His dad had to be able to do the same thing. Derek shook his head.

"No. He will. And the more he tries to resist Deucalion giving that order, the stronger your dad gets, but it also makes the Alpha stronger, too. The Alpha takes power from those in his pack, so the stronger the pack, the stronger the alpha. And Deucalion has a _pack_ of Alphas. He has Scott's strength, times at least four, but probably more because who knows how big his pack really is. My pack wasn't strong enough, when I had it. I can't fight him. Your dad doesn't have a shot in hell."

"Then we gotta get him out of there," said Stiles. "Which is why I can't leave him-"

"It's why you can't be _near_ him. You're important to him, he's going to fight anything Deucalion says about you, which just feeds that power more. And you're important to Scott, and you're important to me. If he wants to make Scott crack, or your dad, it'll be through you," Derek told him, spelling it out in a little clearer terms. "That’s why he took you from Argent. We all had to back down until we knew where you were. When Scott found out about the order for the meeting at the loft, he sent Isaac and Boyd in his place so he could dodge, because we didn't know you were there.”

Stiles wasn't making the connection at all. Scott had pretty thoroughly ruined Stiles' life at a steady pace for the past year, so what did he care _now_? "I don't get it."

"An Alpha keeps their power if their beta dies, Stiles. And he'll be stronger for it. The Alphas following Deucalion killed their packs for it," said Derek. "It's... it's like chess. You take the piece off the board, you keep it. I lost most of my pack, they left. Even Peter. But since Erica died on my watch, I'm... just an alpha without a pack. Easy prey. And Scott's fighting an Alpha telling him to kill Isaac and Boyd every day. And we're fighting an entire pack of Alphas who are trying to take us _all_ out. And your dad's _helping_."

"I'm not- I'm not a wolf, not a beta."

"Chess pieces don't look the same either. Not everyone in a pack is a wolf. And just because you and Scott aren't exactly friends anymore doesn't mean he's gonna be okay if Deucalion takes his bishop off the board again. Especially not for good."

Somehow that made sense and Stiles stared down at the floor, stuck. He shoved it around in his head for a minute, trying to find an angle, but he was too far out of the loop to have anything Derek hadn't already thought of. He had been in it, and protecting Stiles from it for months. Finally, he shook his head and looked up at Derek.

"If I'm the bishop, you're the rook. Higher value. _You_ can't go back either," he pointed out. Derek shrugged, spread his hands.

"I can't exactly join the army and disappear," he replied.

"No, but if you stay with me, we can buy enough time to figure something out. Something that _will_ work."

It seemed to amuse Derek at least a little, the grim scowl loosening up some at the edges. Stiles felt the fear in his chest stop hurting some, the panic not quite as tight. It was dumb, but it worked, because Stiles was dumb about a lot of things, and one of them was Derek.

"Look, I mean it, okay? Please? Stay?" he asked, talking just fast enough not to chicken out. "I mean, with me? So I don't have to do it on my own. I get too many ideas and I just get myself in trouble by myself and I don't know any of these people..."

Stiles' ramble only stopped because Derek rolled the chair over to face him, so they sat knee to knee, eye to eye. It made Stiles go completely silent for entire long seconds, at least, and he swore he could hear Derek's heart beating because his own was going way too fast. But that was probably because everything of his insides that didn't already hurt had just turned to goo and was giving him an ulcer.

"Okay," Derek said. Like it was a promise. That counted as a promise. Just in that moment, Stiles was flustered enough to consider it _gospel_. He caught Derek's hands where they rested on his knees to hold on his own instead.

"Okay good."

In the year and a half he had known Derek Hale, Stiles had done or been directly responsible for a lot of dumb things that should have gotten him killed, but he had mostly stopped being afraid of Derek actually being the one to do it. And just then, staring at Derek face to face, with panic and gratitude and whatever it was that liked to kick him in the gut whenever Derek looked at him all jumbled up together, Stiles lost the battle with the insane impulse that really _would_ get him killed.

Stiles held on to Derek's hands, leaned in, and kissed him right on the mouth, because he needed to. He had wanted to for weeks and he had never risked it, and if Derek was going to stay then Stiles needed to get it out of his head, just once. It was dumb, and stupid, and panicked. But it was Stiles.

He eased back to watch Derek again from up close and wait for the predictable, inevitable murder about to commence. Derek stared back at him, looking surprised and yet somehow not. He seemed strangely calm.

"Stiles," Derek said, dragging his name out in a very lazy but no less judgmental and annoyed tone that was far too familiar, really. _So much_ judging. "I just said I would stay. You don't have to try to sell it."

Stiles got momentarily stuck on trying to process the English language, parsing out the death threat somewhere in the words. But there wasn't one to be found. He blinked.

"Wait... are you saying _this_ could actually be a _selling point_?" he asked. He realized he still held Derek's hands when he reached up to wave a finger between them. "Really? I could look into a _career_ in Sales, here-"

Derek let go of his hands to catch Stiles' face instead, very carefully not aggravating the bruise on one side of his face.

"Yes. But not right now. Calm down before you have a heart attack," said Derek.

Well, that did seem reasonable.

Then Derek actually kissed him back, just as quick, but much less clumsy. He let go of Stiles then and scooted the rolling chair back to the desk.

"You should finish getting dressed so Dr. Beckett can fix the burn again," he said.

Stiles scrabbled off the bed to find a shirt - _any shirt_ \- so fast that his feet nearly slipped on the smooth concrete floor.

*~*~*


	21. Chapter 21

**Earth: Beale AFB, California**

It was mid-afternoon before Ellison let Sheppard tap out from training. He had zoned twice, the first time in the open, crowded, buffet-style hospital cafeteria, and then finally at the shooting range.

John had done alright, just adjusting to the noise of the weapons fire around him, but the dial trick failed him when the gun was in his hand. He got caught up in the sounds, the smells of the gun oils and the bullets - not the werewolf kind - and the smoke, even the weight of the weapon in his hand. Something that wasn’t far from second nature, that he had missed more than it was probably healthy to admit, was an entirely brand new experience after a month away from it.

Sheppard chased the tiny sound of the next round hitting the chamber and it was all over. One second he was shooting a target downrange, and the next, Ellison was helping him up off the ground and muttering about having to get John’s hand checked. John had zoned while squeezing the trigger and Ellison had a helluva time prying the gun from his hand, and of course John had fallen in the process, because he was too busy chasing sounds to remember to keep his balance. At least he was getting better about breathing. John still smacked his wrist on the shelf in front of him, and his head smarted from denting the dividing wall between lanes.

“I hate this,” John reported as he stared at the elevator doors. Ellison nodded, still placating, but not unsympathetic. Sheppard tried flexing his fingers to shake off the frustrating pain in his wrist and regretted it. He carried his arm tucked across his chest after that, just to make himself stop testing the injury.

They got back to McKay’s hospital room to find the man actually standing and dressed once again in his own clothes. At least he wasn’t reading the damn book again.

“Sit,” Ellison instructed, pointing John at the room’s spare bed like an errant puppy.

“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Sheppard. And he sat on the bed, as he was told... just on the other side of it. He looked over to see McKay watching them and looking slightly alarmed.

“What happened?” he asked. Blair echoed him from the chair in the corner.

“Nothing,” said John easily.

“Zoned,” said Ellison. He looked to Blair. “You wanna maybe see if someone can check him out?”

Blair nodded and stood up to let himself out to the nurse’s station without another word about it.

“What happened to the ‘no life support’ threat?” Rodney asked, because he was an astute man of science who remembered useful things. John pointed at him to second his words.

“Yes. That. Good point,” he said.

“Checking to clear concussion and broken bones isn’t exactly life support,” replied Jim.

“Oh come on. I didn’t hit that hard,” complained Sheppard. Rodney let out a dry huff of annoyance.

“That figures. I finally pass the blood test to get out of here, and you’re admitted,” he said. Because Rodney McKay was _also_ regularly an asshole.

“Yes, Rodney. I zoned out on the shooting range so I could torture you with an extended hospital stay,” replied John, rolling his eyes. “All part of the plan.”

Still, he waited a moment for his friend’s feathers to unruffle before nodding at him. “Glad you’re feeling better, though.”

“If only I could say the same,” said Rodney, meeting John’s moment of sincerity with their more natural sarcasm.

“Hey, McKay,” John said, tone idle and innocuous as possible. Rodney looked over at him, suspicions raised. As they should be.

“What?” he asked. John smirked at him.

“Just wanted to remind you, werewolves are still real.”

“Oh, shut up,” Rodney replied. He sat down - however very carefully - in the chair Sandburg had abandoned, clearly annoyed. Supervising by the door, Ellison pinched the bridge of his nose like he was nursing his own headache, or missing the shooting range. Sandburg returned then. He looked from Jim and his headache to John and the wrist he was unconsciously still favoring.

“They’ll send someone. What happened?” he asked.

“I zoned while I was shooting at the range,” John told him. “Ellison had to take the gun from me and I fell. Hit my head and my wrist on the way down, I guess. I don’t even remember it. Nothing terrible.”

“Hit your wrist,” Rodney clarified. “Meaning the appendage needed to shoot things with bullets.”

“I’ve got two,” defended John, not bothered. There was no heat to it, but that didn’t mean he needed McKay’s logic chiming in on the thing he was trying to magically willpower into non-existence. “Shut up.”

Sandburg glanced between them, wary of wandering into the target range of the open sass. His attention settled on McKay.

“When they get in here, how about I take point on this one?” he asked Rodney. The man went bug eyed, started to nod his head before remembering that his head apparently still hurt and moving did not help.

“Not it,” Rodney said instead. McKay and Sheppard were certainly a pair. Between them, Sheppard figured they had a combined mental age of twenty, and that was being generous sometimes.

“I’m fine,” Sheppard repeated, rolling his eyes.

And of course, an hour later, it was a hairline fracture and the not-Carson doctor was recommending (to Sandburg) that they keep it immobile. He suggested a cast and Sheppard refused; there was no way he wouldn’t go absolutely _insane_ fighting a cast on his arm after the irritation from the plastic wrap over the tattoo. The expert Sandburg agreed and the doctor allowed a removable brace instead.

Sheppard was annoyed with the way the Ortho deferred to Sandburg, but he was just frustrated enough with himself to let it slide. If they took care of it now, it would be healed by the time they got back to Atlantis, and John wouldn’t be so cranky in general.

“What about pain medications?” the doctor asked. Sheppard nodded; those would also help.

“Whatever you’ve got, no problems,” said John. The doctor’s attention went back to Blair again.

“Acetaminophen. No NSAIDs. Max 500mg. We’ll up it if he does okay,” said Blair. Sheppard glared at the doctor for writing that down but not noting what the actual patient had said. He glanced at Sandburg, annoyed.

“I’ve taken stronger than that since I was twelve years old,” he complained.

“I’m kind of hoping we don’t have to start you over at the beginning with baby Aspirin, so let’s just roll with the low dose for now,” said Blair. Sheppard gawked at the apparent threat that Blair had somehow delivered without the slightest hint of sarcasm. It was pure, hard fact, apparently. Sentinel senses came with medical application of baby Aspirin to full grown adults who had taken uppers and street drugs in their youth to get around long days and demanding war zones. It was borderline insulting.

“Okay, well, we’re never letting McKay find out that baby Aspirin is potentially required,” John said, remembering every instance of shit he had ever dished out about the man’s citrus allergy. “ _Never_.”

“Then just pray the acetaminophen doesn’t make you loopy or sick,” said Sandburg, offering a sympathetic shrug. “Otherwise, I promise, he’ll find out and you’ll probably be the one to tell him.”

John swore at the wall rather than risk offending Sandburg by swearing in his general direction. Not that it was the man’s fault at all, but he wrote the book and could quote it chapter and verse at the doctor, and the doctor was just fine ignoring almost every word out of John’s mouth so far. He had to make sure to keep Sandburg on his side.

As the doctor disappeared to do whatever he did when he wasn’t ignoring his patients to their faces, John was left with many complaints, a few questions, and an opinion or two that nobody wanted to hear about, all rattling around in his head. Sandburg sat in a chair by the door, sorting through a tray of pamphlets about god-knew-what out of apparent boredom. Sandburg the Guide was laidback and quiet, not loud and pacing energy like McKay. It actually made Sheppard twitchy.

“Look, I’m not arguing, so don’t jump on me like Ellison did,” John said finally, when he got tired of wearing down the same track in his brain. Rodney could research questions maybe, but John had to actually ask them. “I just don’t get it. So I’m asking. So no jumping, got it?”

Blair looked up at him, alert attention. “That’s what I’m here for. What’s up, man?”

“Well, that’s kinda the whole thing,” John said. “Rodney’s not you. This... is not his stuff. Asking the guy to even fake it, if this is what it all is? First off, it’ll go straight to his head, he’ll yell at the docs about being voodoo practitioners. And second, he’s not patient, _and_ some kinda germaphobe, and wouldn’t last five minutes in a doctor’s office if it wasn’t his own injury. This... is like asking him to sign up and volunteer for waterboarding.”

“He _did_ volunteer,” Blair pointed out. “Without actually having to be asked, as I recall.”

“He didn’t know I was gonna be stuck to a babysitter like I was eight, either,” John replied.

“He had an idea of it, actually. He really wants to get you a lawyer,” said Blair, somehow amused by the threat he had probably heard some time that morning.

“He was pissed when he read the manual,” John agreed.

“ _I_ was pissed when I read the manual," said Blair, mild about the admission. "It hasn’t really calmed down any.”

“McKay doesn’t.” There was quiet for a moment after that, John still stuck in worry as Blair seemed to think it all over.

“I dunno, man,” Blair finally said. “We didn’t _design_ things this way. It’s just how things started going. The more teams we sent out, the more of a reputation was built. And Sentinel teams can get violent, so this stuff followed. Doctors don’t mess around.”

He motioned toward his own presence in John’s doctor visit and shrugged. “I could have sat it out, let you handle it on your own, but the guy still would have tracked me down. And statistically speaking, you would have ended up with a prescription that could have knocked you out for the next week.”

“A week?” John blurted. “Really?”

“As all over the place as your senses seem to be, it wouldn’t surprise me,” Blair replied. John kicked at the floor, annoyed as he processed that.

“But, to your point, yes. I’m not like Rodney. _You’re_ very different from Jim’s case,” Blair went on. “The gene activating didn’t turn you into a clone. It changes a lot. Think of it like... chaos theory in motion. You don’t know what tiny things will change as you adapt, as the people around you adapt, because you can’t predict the chain reactions. So maybe Rodney can handle this stuff, you just don’t know.”

“I don’t _want_ to handle this stuff,” replied John. “It’s annoying that I can’t keep _sane_ enough not to get hurt at the range, but I have to keep at it. Even Jim said it seems one-sided. Why the hell should he have to, when the only thing he’s gonna get out of it is apparently shot in the head.”

"Hey. You weren’t there, and you showed up when he needed you to,” Blair said, quick to derail that entire guilt trip before John could chase it down.

“And even if that’s all it ever is, that kinda kismet is sometimes worth the effort. I mean, Jim gets amped up and worried about me, he gets bossy, and he’s a pain in the ass. But whatever. He was that way before, just my friend, and it didn’t change. We just sorta have come to understand why. He always shows up. And however it works, I get the same way if I know something’s up. I’ll get paranoid and have to start digging to track him down. I know when to check in with him. That’s not his problem, that’s my gut refusing to let me form a coherent thought until I know I’m not missing something. Ask any of the teams I’ve ever worked with, they’ll say something similar. Nobody knows why.”

“Give Rodney twenty minutes with the data and he’d tell you he could find out,” said John.

“Maybe I will, but that doesn’t mean he’s going back to the SGC,” replied Blair, sitting back in the chair and grinning, smug.

“That’s not what I was getting at,” insisted John. “I just don’t get it.”

“I know, it’s cool,” said Blair, waving him off the defense. “But, look. You’re stuck in Lt. Colonel mode here. You’re trying to do the job that says protect the nerd, run the risk assessment, destroy the threat. But you can’t put him or you in some kind of lockdown. This _Guide thing_ isn’t a threat to us. _He’s_ not a threat to you. Near as I can tell, you guys are friends, and you need help he’s willing to offer. Just go with that. Don’t get stuck on the rest of it. This stuff with the doctors is just part of it. And this stuff is literally my job. I’m getting paid to be here, in this room. It’s not some kind of standard.”

Sheppard paused to consider that. Technically, he was being paid to sit there, too. His entire team was still working, even if they were on Earth, waiting around for him to get his shit together.

“Doc’s coming back” John said, an honest observation that he was a little proud of being able to make. He could track a conversation and intentionally snoop around the walls outside the room, too. That counted as an improvement in control.

“Hey, don’t push it,” Blair cautioned anyway. “Volume down in here.”

“Yes, mother,” Sheppard muttered. Blair seemed amused.

“You and Rodney should have a conversation about that stuff,” Blair went on. “Go to the source. That’s usually allowed.”

“That sounds like an absolutely _terrible_ idea,” replied John with a blatantly false cheerfulness.

“Oh? Man, what’d you think’ll happen when he figures out you’re _afraid_ of him now?” asked Sandburg, just barely not laughing out loud.

“I am not-” Sheppard’s attempt at correcting the man’s observation was interrupted by the door opening, the doctor and his nurse letting themselves in with a new tray of medical supplies to torture him with. They started setting up to take care of John’s busted wrist and arranging things with Sandburg. It left John free to climb into his own head for a minute to figure out why the hell he was at all afraid of dealing with the ever annoying Rodney McKay.

*~*~*

Rodney was cleared to leave the base and impatient to go. Thankfully, John didn’t have to stay at the hospital. Sheppard was just cranky, and argued with Sandburg about whether or not he was cranky enough to take medicine for the pain.

“I don’t need it,” Sheppard insisted.

“Sounds like you do,” said Sandburg.

“It’s just a tiny fracture.”

“A break is still a break,” said Ellison. They all sat at a hospital cafeteria booth, eating dinner as they waited for Sam’s transportation request to go through for an available rental car or magical air force taxi to get them to Blair and Jim’s Sentinel Project.

“From what I read this morning, you still need to take pain medications,” Rodney offered up. “Probably even more so, because your system could be highly sensitive to chemical changes, and there’s a whole mess of hormones involved with pain receptors. Taking the medication can help stop the hormone production and keep everything more normal.”

John looked up at him, not quite pouting over his burger and fries, but maybe actually listening. Then, grudgingly, he dug in his pants pocket for the bottle of medication.

“Fine,” he said. He had a second of trouble getting the lid open because of the brace on his left hand, but Sheppard was still smarter than a childproof medicine bottle. As he downed the pill, Rodney reached out and picked up the bottle to see what he had been given. John snatched it back quickly but Rodney saw the label easily enough. He looked to Blair, surprised.

“He could get that stuff over the counter,” he said.

“Yeah, so?” asked John. “Leave my medicine _stuff_ alone.”

“What- I was just looking...”

“ _No_. I said no,” said John.

Next to Sheppard, Jim Ellison looked across the table at Blair, looking just as confused as Rodney felt from Sheppard’s sudden territorial streak. Blair sighed.

“He’s probably still mad at the doctor,” he said, quiet about it since they were still in the hospital’s cafeteria. “And at the fact that he shouldn’t have anything stronger than over the counter pain medication until he knows for certain he can handle it. And now’s not a great time to experiment with it, either.”

That made sense. At least, a little. John’s mood didn’t track though. “Well, you don’t have to snap my head off about it,” Rodney said.

“Well, you could still _ask_ before touching _my stuff,_ ” replied John soberly. He did have a valid point. Rodney frowned but nodded.

“That’s fair,” he said.

“Thank you,” said John. He stayed uncharacteristically quiet for the rest of dinner, The Sentinel side of the table stayed nearly silent, but Blair sat next to Rodney and poked quietly at the subject of Atlantis without mentioning it by name, asking what ‘the post’ was like in vague terms, if Carson was the only doctor to deal with, what kind of lab capabilities he had.

“Better than here,” Rodney assured him. “And I can run half the city’s more experimental tech from my lab to boost it. I’m amazed they thought your lab here could somehow offer better answers.”

“Well, the _experience_ , we can offer answers on that. Maybe not the more technical aspects,” said Blair. “We’ve done a lot with breaking down the ProX, but we’ve got a team of six guys on it. That’s it. And we only got the funding for four of them once we accidentally linked it to the ATA. It’s not bad, but our lab stuff isn’t great.”

“Bring the data with you, I’ll work on it with Carson,” said Rodney. Blair nodded, started to say something, but his cell phone buzzed. He attacked his backpack and answered quickly.

"Hey, Colonel Carter..."

A moment later, Rodney glanced up at Jim and John as both of them started cleaning up the last of their plates. The guys who could hear more than one half of the conversation sure seemed ready to leave. Rodney looked down at the remnants of his meal, just a little salad left, and decided if they were moving out he could leave it.

“Alright, thanks, Colonel. We’ll head out. When are you guys meeting up with us?” Blair asked the phone. Rodney crunched on a carrot slice and waited to be told to move, but he shamelessly listened in on the part of the conversation he could hear. John had suddenly gone from ready to leave and cranky, to looking somewhat shocked, and Ellison looked like he had just developed another headache. All Rodney knew was it wasn’t his fault this time.

“You’re kidding, right?” Blair asked. Rodney looked at Sheppard, kicked at his boot to get his attention.

“What happened?” he whispered at him. John waved him off, still intent on snooping on what Rodney couldn’t hear. McKay sat back again and found more crunchy food to work on to kill time.

“Yeah, of course we can. There’ll be some paperwork, but that’s... I mean, that’s the whole reason we fought to get the lab going in the first place. I was just talking about this stuff with Rodney, wow...” said Blair. There was a beat and then the man started nodding. “Yeah. Of course. Go with what Dr. Beckett said... yeah, we’ll get stuff set up tonight. Tomorrow, he thinks?”

Blair was still on the phone, but he waved to give the signal to leave. Rodney grabbed his backpack, the only stuff he had with him, and stood up from the booth. He was still a little fussy about anything getting near his head, and standing up made him dizzy for a second, distracting him from tracking Blair's conversation. He blinked as John showed up at his shoulder and caught his arm, tugging him toward the door. He was still cranky, but he at least wasn't being a jerk anymore.

"Come on. The base is flying us over," he said, voice pitched just loud enough for Rodney as he got them moving.

"Oh, great, more helicopters," said Rodney. He resigned himself to an aching head and kept pace with John. "Fine. So what's the other-"

"Your luck is just astounding," John observed, apparently random. McKay frowned, confused, and tried to figure out if he was supposed to be arguing about it or accepting it as fact.

"Okay..."

"You and Sandburg... you found a kid with the ATA gene and oh, by the way, he's another baby Sentinel, like me, except... you know, actually like, a _baby_. Comparatively speaking," said Sheppard. He didn't sound as cranky about it, just in a hurry.

"What? Stiles? Or Derek?" McKay asked.

"If Derek's a werewolf, I'm gonna bet he doesn't need the sensory boost," Sheppard whispered, and Rodney just barely heard him.

" _I_ do," said Rodney. "So Stiles, then?"

"Yep."

"And the Project is gonna take him in?"

"That's what it sounded like Blair was getting at," replied Sheppard.

"Good. The kid needs kept out of trouble," said Rodney. There was an odd smirk on John's face then.

"Since when do you care about people, Rodney?" he asked lightly. Rodney blinked, surprised at the question.

"I _care_..."

"No, you _yell_ ," said John. They made it to the door to the parking lot and John held it open to usher him out. "Except this kid, you wanted us to pull him out. And then me, with the Guide thing. Did you really say you wanna help with that? Like, you mean it?"

"Yes, I meant it... is _that_ why you're being weird? It's your thing-"

"I'm being _weird_ because I'm just pissed off in general," muttered John. " _And_ I zoned out while I was shooting _and_ I got hurt and I'm pissed off at myself for it still."

"But there's a reason for it. It will get better when you get used to it. I mean, now that we know..."

"Yeah, I get that," said John. He pulled Rodney to a stop, standing in the middle of a parking lot outside the hospital building. Rodney looked around, confused, and he saw Blair still on the phone and Jim walking the pair of them briskly toward the hangar and the chopper again. They had been a few yards behind, but now Rodney watched them pass ahead and keep going. Sheppard caught his attention back.

"What I need to know is why _you're_ okay with it. Why you volunteered to let me drag you around and to do this training bullshit. It means if I get paranoid about some _stupid_ small thing, I gotta track you down, interrupt you, god knows what. And when we get back home, one of us has to move closer if I'm supposed to get any sleep, _and_ this means you are stuck on _every_ detail I go out on. For _months_. And it's just because of my stupid senses, because I keep looking for you, and it makes me screw up. That's _on me_ , not you, so... why the hell do you want to put up with it? It's gonna screw everything up."

Rodney stared at him, somehow struck by the fact that he didn't have an answer for it already. What was in it for him. It was one of those questions Rodney McKay would ordinarily have already asked himself a dozen times over and been solid on at least five different fact-based reasons why tolerating someone or something interrupting his work and his life was worthwhile.

If there wasn't sufficient justification, it wasn't something he was interested in doing. It wasn't that he _didn't_ care about other people, it was that Rodney very definitely cared about himself _before_ other people, out of a very well-honed sense of self-preservation.

Having read the two books he could on the Sentinel situation, Rodney had a good idea that it was going to make him have to learn how to do things differently, upend a few routines, and tolerate John screwing up his day. Or stopping him, in the middle of the parking lot, to demand he explain himself for _not_ being an asshole about something important.

There was no genetic link between a Sentinel and Guide, at least nothing that had been found yet. The book said outright that there was no scientific explanation for the phenomenon, and it bugged Rodney to not know more than anecdotal accounts and descriptions and cause and effect blind guesses as to what the Guide brought to the team. They were described as a partner, like a sniper's watchman who checked the numbers on the wind and made sure no one snuck up from behind. A copilot maybe, but Rodney wasn't the best with flying the puddle jumpers; he just kept them in the air.

So far as Rodney could tell, the Guide offered dumb luck and the ability to think smart when the Sentinel was either zoned out or chasing down instinct that would get them killed. And he was, himself, annoyingly determined to make sure John Sheppard wasn't left high and dry to sort the mess out on his own, so he couldn't rule out instinct as a larger problem in general yet.

And now Rodney understood that part of the whole thing was going to mean not having the fact-based answer when John cornered him with the mildly distressed look on his face and the annoyed panic in his voice. There had to be an answer, and Rodney was the guy who was good at fixing answers.

"I... I don't actually know," Rodney said, meeting John's very intense stare as honestly as he could. "I just... need to help. And I want to make sure you're okay. We've got our team, and this is how we keep it. We stay together and don't leave anybody behind."

"I'm not being left behind," John started to argue.

"You won't _be you_ until you can handle your senses, and you can't do that if you're always looking for something that's not there," said Rodney. "So yes, it _would_ be leaving you behind. And I won't do that."

John stood there for nearly a minute and he didn't argue with Rodney about it again. He finally nodded.

"So we're doing this?" he finally asked. He held up his right hand to show the bright tattoo. "No take-backs. We get on the chopper and you gotta trust me and I gotta trust you and if we fuck it up along the way, we gotta sort it out. No blowing up any solar systems with us still in them-"

"And no shooting me," cut in Rodney. "Arrows or bullets or otherwise, yes. That's what we're doing."

"The Sentinel and Guide _thing_ ," said John. Rodney nodded.

"That. We do _that_ ," he agreed. He held out his right hand as an offer to seal it the old fashioned way with a handshake. John smiled again and took it.

"I'd say thanks, but I think I should be apologizing. And you're stuck with it, either way," he said. But he seemed more relaxed as he shook Rodney's hand, and he tugged at his arm to start them walking toward the chopper.

"Actually, we're not at the helicopter yet, so I _could_ still sit this one out," Rodney replied, smug in the face of the glaring loophole Sheppard had left in their gentlemen's agreement. "I'm not stuck with anything yet."

"McKay, I haven't kissed a man to shut him up since college but I swear to god if you make me take it up again _on base_ , I will," muttered John. Rodney wasn't quite sure he heard him as they were walking quickly, and he was a half step behind. He tried to catch up without tripping.

"Wait. Did you- what-"

John glanced over at him, the picture of clueless. "What?"

"Did I just hear-"

"Gonna miss our flight," John said, like that was what Rodney had misheard. Rodney was suddenly stuck, wondering if he had really heard anything at all, but there was still that look on his friend's face that said he was being played.

"I am _pretty sure_ they're gonna wait for us," he said. He caught Sheppard by the wrist to make him stop and face him instead. "Now what's this about you kissing things?"

John tilted his head. "Dunno. Was that an invitation?"

Rodney sighed and rolled his eyes at the innocence of the man watching him. "Oh god. John, come on, we _just_ said we gotta work together, and trust each other, and now you've got _jokes_ -"

"Wasn't a joke, I was just saying, don't think I won't," said John with an agreeing nod. "If you're gonna catch me on loopholes, I'll just... get creative."

"I am _so_ much better than you at loopholes, all the time, don't even-"

"We gonna get on the chopper or get creative? I could go either way, but both end up on the chopper," said John. "Just the difference of a few extra steps in between."

Rodney was really bad at social cues, as a rule. Most everything went over his head until it smacked him in the face. And John stood up a little taller, and looked down at him just enough to be in his face. Oh.

"Wait... is _creative_ , like, a built-in feature that they left out of the book, or-"

"More like just a preferred _loophole_ with the Guide upgrade," said John, grinning at him. From very close. Rodney stared, because John stared, which meant they had permission to do so, and he was having a little trouble concentrating on the rest of the parking lot. There was _no_ chance he was reading these social cues correctly.

"Creative works," he said. It was one of those moments where the wrong part of his brain controlled his mouth, because his rational, logical mind had in no way intended to encourage Sheppard's more-blatant-than-usual flirting face. It was the other part, the part that flirted back without consciously realizing it, the part that always called John's bluff, that did it again as they stood there.

It seemed to be the answer John was angling for, too. He leaned in enough to brush a very soft kiss against Rodney's lips.

"Rodney," John said, in a very quiet version of what Rodney knew to be his happy voice. "Please guide me to the chopper. So we can go to training. And then go home."

Every few words were accented with another careful kiss. And Rodney gave high marks for creativity, because that would definitely have gotten him around the loophole he had jokingly threatened John with.

John straightened up again as Rodney tried to catch up to the present, taking his time processing words because he was only eighty percent certain he wasn't hallucinating again. He could still be in a coma from wolfsbane poisoning and that would make perhaps more sense than John Sheppard kissing him in the middle of a parking lot on an Air Force base. But after two years of following Sheppard around on missions, and coming home each time grateful to be following him back, Rodney was more than okay with accepting that not everything had to make sense just then.

"Okay." Rodney leaned up to chance another kiss before catching John's hand and turning to walk with him toward the chopper waiting not far from the hangar. He matched Rodney's pace and kept at his shoulder, smiling over at him every few yards, like he had to make sure he was still there. It wasn't something Rodney was used to, but he liked it, even caught himself smiling back once he got over the public display of it.

When they got to the chopper, Jim Ellison stood outside and Blair sat in the big open door, kicking his feet as he and Jim killed time waiting. The public-awareness thing came back and Rodney felt a little more flush than he could blame on the taped-up head injury just then. He let go of John's hand on the excuse of shrugging out of his backpack to get ready to load into the chopper. John still helped get the pack off his bad shoulder.

"You good?" Ellison asked, looking to John.

"Pretty great, Captain," said Sheppard. He was still all lazy smiles and Rodney was somewhere between wanting to hide from the chopper crew, and wanting to own that he had (somehow) very directly helped put the smile on the man's stupidly handsome face.

"Thank christ we're done with that shit," he heard Ellison mutter at Blair as the man ducked by him to climb into the chopper. Blair looked like he was trying not to laugh. Instead, he looked between Rodney and John.

"You two okay now? Ready to go?" he asked them. Rodney looked over at John still just at his shoulder.

"One Sentinel and Guide team, reporting for training," said Sheppard. Blair nodded acceptance of that and hopped down from the door to clear the way in. He clapped Rodney on the shoulder encouragingly.

"Good luck," he said. "You're gonna have your hands full."

John glanced over at Rodney then, a smug smile on his lips and a very suggestive wag of the eyebrows making Blair's well-intentioned comment into something else entirely in Rodney's mind.

"Oh god." Rodney stood on the tarmac, rethinking the wisdom of his choices. Then John jumped up into the chopper and reached back down to help Rodney up. McKay wasn't at all inclined to back out on his promise, but he suddenly realized he had made his own life much more creatively uncomfortable in unforeseen ways.

"Stop smiling like an idiot," he said under his breath, knowing full well that John could hear him. Still, he took the offered hand and climbed into the chopper beside Sheppard. His friend had reduced the wattage on the smile only slightly and plucked the sunglasses from his shirt collar to hide behind again. Rodney hadn't seen those all day. And he quickly decided they didn't help _his_ problem, and he figured John knew it.

"Buckle up, buddy," John said helpfully as he settled into the seat beside him.

*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> __________________________________________________________
> 
> uhm. so. i had to take the gen/pre-slash tag off the fic. kinda forgot to mention that earlier... Sorry!
> 
> __________________________________________________________


	22. Chapter 22

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

When they got to the lab, Dr. Beckett was there, back at the work day, with a cup of tea. He was a naturally cheerful sort of guy. And if it wasn’t natural, he was a robot, but Stiles had been proven wrong on his bet on Ronon as a shifter so he wasn’t gambling on robots yet.

“Afternoon, lads. Feelin’ better?” the doctor asked.

“Afternoon? What time is it?” Stiles felt a little messed up without daylight. Carson checked his watch and seemed a little surprised himself.

“Oh. Near six now. Cafeteria switched to supper by now,” he reported. He set his tea down and gave Stiles an assessing look. “It was a late night, so there was no harm in sleep when ye need it. As long as you’re feeling okay. Nothing new added to the list, I hope?”

“No, I’m good. Need a new bandage for the burn though,” said Stiles quickly.

“That we can manage,” said Carson. “And I think we should take the day and get you back up on your feet. You’re dehydrated, and there’s a few things that showed up in the tests. We’ll go over them, but I think an IV will help. Not a magic bullet, but a solid shortcut to consider.”

“Was he drugged?” asked Derek, a pointer on alert suddenly.

Carson hesitated. “Well, that’s hard to narrow down exactly. You said the trouble was a week ago? Most drugs will be out of the system by then, unless used regularly for a time.”

“He was gone for two weeks,” said Derek. Stiles choked on air.

“Two weeks? I thought it was a few days!” Stiles felt like hitting him for leaving him out of a very important detail of his own life, but he didn’t feel like hurting his hand for the effort. Derek stared at Stiles, the concern-face on like the idiot was trying to read Stiles’ mind to clarify the difference between two weeks and a few days.

“No, close to two weeks. You missed check in with me and Argent both, so we knew you were gone within twelve hours. And it’s been five days now since we lost the loft,” said Derek. He glanced at Carson. “So it would have been at least five days since he had whatever they gave him.”

Stiles hopped up onto the patient bed in the lab and curled his knees up to hide behind. Now he knew why Derek had spent a week as a wolf rather than talk to him. He was probably making sure Stiles didn’t smell like death or something.

Carson looked between the two of them, concern plain on his face. “Aye, that’d do it.”

“So then you found something,” Derek said. Carson nodded.

“Well. His system’s slowed down from something, liver function is down. But he’s dehydrated, as I said,” the doctor said. “And what did show up looks to be in the benzodiazepines family. It’s a... minor tranquilizer, sometimes used to treat anxiety, or seizures, or such. Hence we have to rule out the possibility of it being prescribed.”

Stiles pulled a face, disgusted with himself for a few different reasons suddenly. He should have starved. Should have known better. “I stopped taking my meds when my dad died,” he said, quiet. “I didn’t take anything.”

“Then we’ll get ye clear of it,” said Carson. “Flush it out as best we can, and start you on an antibiotic and a few other things to boost your immune system back up and fight it. Alright with you?”

Stiles nodded. He still looked to Derek for confirmation as an afterthought, and Derek didn’t raise any red flags. The doctor was telling the truth. Werewolves were annoying but could at least be useful.

“Alright. Now there’s still one other factor at work in this mess,” said Carson.

“Oh my god. What now.” Stiles rolled his eyes, strangely not surprised by the promise of more bad news. Good news would have caused a heart attack.

“Remember the genetic fingerprint I was testing for, the ATA gene. Well, ye have it. A high percentage of it, actually,” said Carson. “And near as I can tell, you also carry another bit of active genetic code we know as ProX. And under ordinary, healthier circumstances, you would be feeling the boost from the activated ProX already. The fact that you’re not is slightly concerning, but it makes sense, given ye spent two weeks on tranquilizers.”

“Huh?” Stiles wasn’t quite following. There was too much biology class built in to everything Carson said, and Stiles hadn’t had the best year, scholastically speaking.

“He’s saying you should be a human lie-detector by now, and you’re not because of the drugs suppressing your system,” translated Derek. He looked to Carson for confirmation. “That’s why you gave us the book with the rest of the stuff.”

“Aye. We didn’t want to completely overwhelm you,” said Carson. “Beyond the necessary. And, short of handing you off to Blair Sandburg, that book is the best information available.”

“What’s Blair got to do with it?” asked Stiles.

“He wrote the book,” said Derek. Stupid werewolves and their stupid knowing things, and Stiles pouted at his knees.

“The very same. And I consulted with him a bit ago on how best to handle getting you back to normal when your system is like to be so very sensitive right now. So I’ve tracked down the safest antibiotic to try, and if ye aren’t opposed to tea, he had a few ideas to try more natural solutions to help,” reported the doctor.

Stiles nodded mutely. “So all of this stuff is why I’m tired?”

“May be. Or it may be you’re trying to heal and need the proper rest,” said Carson. “So we’ll set you up in here today. And then tomorrow try to get you to Blair. We’ll coordinate better at that point.”

It seemed like as good a plan as any, so Stiles didn’t argue.

“What about the Sentinel Project?” Derek asked. Stiles recognized the name from conversations overheard the day before. The human lie-detectors were called Sentinels - which was cool - and apparently he was one now, so it made sense, but Stiles still didn’t know anything about it.

“Blair said he’ll be looking into securing you a place in the program, if you want it,” Carson said, looking to Stiles. “But that’s another topic well outside my knowledge, I’m afraid. I only know what I’ve seen from Colonel Sheppard’s case, and read from that book I passed along, and neither you nor John are exactly textbook from what I’ve seen. That’s why I want to get you back to Blair- Dr. Sandburg as quick as possible. So ye have the resources at hand when ye start to feel better. I expect you’ll start experiencing the ProX symptoms at that point and... it can be a bit of a shock.”

“Great,” said Stiles, hardly feeling the sarcasm. And as Carson set Stiles up with an IV and a pitcher of water and another of funny lemonade, Derek and their armed-guard babysitter went to find and bring back cafeteria food, so Stiles stayed mellow as he processed the news overload. He pressed warily for more hints of what to expect from the ProX whatever, but it was a hesitant pestering. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know more bad news. The doctor explained the positive outcomes, with Jim Ellison as a shining example of military efficiency thanks to his Sentinel skills. But he warned of more headaches and problems on the horizon.

The tranquilizers in his system, faded as they were, kept Stiles numb to a lot of the pain of the last few weeks. Over the next few hours, things started to hurt that he thought were almost gone. But maybe he was just paying attention to everything again, worrying over everything. Stiles got some color back in his pale face, and every week-old bruise stood out more green and purple. Carson couldn’t even look at him without frowning.

It was arranged to keep him overnight in the infirmary, so he could stay on the IV and someone could check that there were no adverse reactions to the antibiotic, which was apparently a possibility. Carson camped out not far away, at just a radio page supposedly, and he didn’t make Derek leave.

It was Stiles who eventually tried to make Derek leave the uncomfortable chair since they had been given a perfectly acceptable room with a bed in it, but Derek wasn’t interested. They ended up having to share the one Stiles was in, instead. It didn’t go at all as Stiles had planned, but at least he didn’t have to try to explain to anyone where the big black wolf had come from, despite Derek making the empty threat twice.

Derek was being strangely pushy. Not his stupid alpha-failure, angry-pushy, but something calmer and... smarter. It was annoying. Stiles refused to read the book on the Sentinel senses because he wasn’t feeling up to homework, and Derek kept going back around to it.

“This isn’t homework. It’s stuff to help you avoid headaches and blindness and, you know, actual important things you should _probably_ be invested in,” said Derek. The know-it-all was wedged in the bed next to Stiles and kept his voice quiet, but Stiles’ anxiety was up and Derek sounded loud to him, like the computers buzzing along the wall did.

“I can’t concentrate. I don’t want to read anything,” Stiles replied, not bothering to be quiet back.

“Fine. Don’t read,” said Derek. “Just listen to my voice as _I_ read. And maybe something important will sink into your hard skull enough for you to learn it anyway.”

Stiles stared at him, ridiculously close and eye to eye. “ _That_ requires concentration.”

“No, just listening,” said Derek. He shrugged idly. “Which you suck at, so. Practice.”

Exasperated, Stiles stared at the ceiling instead. “Oh my god. You ass. Fine. Knock yourself out.”

Stiles figured that would be the end of it and turned on his side away from Derek, fighting with the blankets that Derek laid on top of, to lift himself a shield against the buzzing of the room around him.

Derek surprised him by shifting up enough against the raised bed pillows and tucking his arm under Stiles’ shoulders and neck to tug him closer to his side. His arm rested easily over Stiles’ chest to hold his shoulder and pulled pain while he was at it. Sourwolf wanted a cuddle. Melting a little inside, Stiles settled back against Derek’s side to listen to him read about some stupid gene. And listen to him breathe. And listen to his heartbeat. And fall asleep.

*~*~*


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ____________________________________________________  
> Note the tag-change!!! We're probably at about a PG-13 content here...  
> (ignoring the four letter words... that alone is probably more like ... higher... )  
> ____________________________________________________

**Earth: Marin County, California**

Thanks to a strange malfunction in the guidance system on the chopper, their first taxi off the base was delayed nearly five hours. It was a long damn afternoon after that because Sheppard had to go back to behaving himself when he really didn’t want to. Rodney (surprisingly) didn’t volunteer to fix the Black Hawk because it wasn’t exactly his area of expertise, so they had spent most of the evening stuck in the hangar office lobby, waiting for their techs to either fix the issue or find them another available chopper crew who could make the forty-minute flight.

The Sentinel Project campus was located somewhere in Marin county, John guessed as they flew over the coast. Just close enough to San Francisco that he broke out laughing when he saw the nighttime skyline out the window beyond Rodney. He was back where he started, across the bay from his college stomping grounds that started it all.

“Maybe while we’re out here, we should stop by and piss off my dad,” Sheppard said. “We can’t be too far out. And the old man hates tattoos.”

Rodney seemed to lock up next to him and John enjoyed it too much; he was just too easy sometimes.

“How about we... not... do that. Right now,” Rodney suggested. John grinned over at him.

“Are you sure? He bought a place down the road from Skywalker Ranch just to piss off Lucas back in the eighties. As far as I know, he’s still got it,” John added.

“No, I think I’m good,” Rodney said, still his usual awkward at covering for his out-of-practice manners. “But I suddenly understand a lot more about you and _Star Wars_.”

“You’re just worried about the shotgun collection,” John teased quietly, just to watch the color on Rodney’s face in the dim light of the chopper. He caught Rodney nod before the man looked back out the window again.

“Relax, McKay. It was a joke. Even if I did know where the guy was living at the moment, we’re not quite on speaking terms,” John said. He bumped his knee at Rodney’s and knocked his hand up against his knuckles, as close to reassuring as he could get without pushing his friend’s potential PDA limits. “You’re safe, I promise.”

Rodney harrumphed into his helmet mic at that and kept his attention out the window. But he latched onto John’s hand and kept snug up at his side. Sheppard was new at the game with Rodney, but he was choosing to guess that meant the teasing was forgiven.

The campus had its own helicopter pad so there wasn’t much of an aerial tour. Everything was low clouds and fog cover. All John could see as he leaned over to look out Rodney’s window was trees until suddenly they were landing. Once Ellison got the door open, again all Sheppard could see around them past the landing pad were more trees and the little swirls of fog clearing from the chopper draft, just from a much different angle.

“Get your stuff,” the Sentinel said into the mic for Rodney’s benefit. “Let’s go.”

Apparently the chopper wouldn’t be landing. John was out of his seat and going for their bags stashed across the aisle while Rodney was still fighting with the comm cord on his helmet. They met up at the door and John followed him out. They moved out to the edge of the landing pad and waited for the chopper to fly off before either of them relaxed, though for different reasons. Rodney was probably worried about the rotors while John just wanted to take the ear plugs out of his damn ears.

It was dark around the landing pad, the only real brightness being the day-glo stripes on the cement and the low pathway lights that marked the outer edge of the landing zone. Otherwise it looked like they had been dropped in the woods again. This time, at night.

John could easily hear the busy sounds of the nearby cities and the rolling roar of the ocean echoing among the trees as the helicopter disappeared back toward the cityscape. The ocean was the wrong one, but there was certainly something relaxing about it, even if it wasn’t home.

Blair caught their attention with his usual energy, not at all the tolerant Guide waiting to deal with a doctor anymore as he swung his arms some to stretch, clapping quietly before flailing in place again. “Okay! So, gentleman. This wasn’t the plan, but neither was the first chopper failing pre-flight, so we’ll roll with it... We’re gonna count this next bit as training, and then everybody’s done for the night once we hit the dorms. Start fresh tomorrow morning.”

“What’s training?” asked Rodney.

“The part where nobody’s allowed to break their necks getting from here to the dorm in the dark,” said Jim. “We’ve never been allowed to pave the trail from here to the campus, and the county has regulations on adding lights to natural trails. It’s not a long hike, but it’s dark.”

“This land borders a preserve,” Blair explained. “No fences, no paved paths, and no messing with the animals.”

“Oh. That’s great,” said Rodney. Considering it was Rodney, he actually didn’t seem all that concerned. “ _Now_ I wish we’d brought the werewolf.”

That was unexpected from his friend and John stifled a snort of laughter. He knew the genius would get over it eventually. Rodney couldn’t explain gods, either, but they had so far met a few. Though he hadn’t seemed to _like_ them much at all.

“I don’t suppose flashlights are allowed?” John asked, mostly for Rodney’s benefit.

“ _You_ don’t want one,” Jim told him, sounding quite certain of that. John looked around at the shadows around them and nodded. Flashlights on white fog would be a bad idea but he could survive if he had to.

“No, but I’m thinking McKay and Sandburg might,” he said.

“Teamwork, Colonel,” said Blair. “Just follow us and don’t let your Guide fall on his face.”

John squinted at him. “Rodney’s not exactly the most graceful in daylight. That’s a tall order.”

Rodney had no trouble seeing him well enough to backhand him in the gut for the slight, so at least he could tell the difference between John and Jim in the dark. Good sign.

“First time I fall, I break out the flashlight,” McKay said. John looked over at him. It was obviously a threat, and his friend even pulled the tone he used when he was worried but mostly annoyed-on-principle. Sheppard was an unabashed asshole and had dubbed it Rodney’s _brave_ voice because he thought it was charming and had always paid attention to it. Now he was in the woods with the man, in the dark, and was paying entirely too much attention to Rodney’s lips. For John, this little trust-exercise was going to be a problem. Sheppard coughed slightly and straightened up, forcing himself not to relax like he wanted to.

“That’s fair,” he managed. Rodney dug in his pack and pulled out the flashlight; obviously his trust had limits. Also fair. If Sheppard couldn’t keep McKay from getting hurt twice in two days, he deserved to have flashlight beams stab him in the eyes. He probably deserved that anyway, but Rodney had already made the blood sacrifice to the mission gods for training purposes, and John wasn’t going to risk any further offerings.

“Let’s go,” he said, good mood tempered in favor of getting back to work.

The helicopter had only taken a few hours to fix, but the sun had been down for at least an hour, even on the coast, and the fog was the usual soupy. It was plenty of light for John, but he noticed Rodney’s attention was drawn to the glow of the edge lights on the chopper pad more than the peeks of the sky over the trees, so he couldn’t quite trust that his interpretation of _plenty_ was the same as Rodney or Blair’s. John caught Rodney’s hand and set it on his shoulder, something they were familiar enough with after two years of off-world runs in far less-friendly situations. Rodney tapped confirmation out of habit and stuck close as they followed after Ellison and Sandburg along a barely defined trail.

It was a glorified animal trail if anything. They were up at the top of a hill, out among the many ridges over the ocean just above San Francisco, and they had to work their way down toward sea level. John caught a few snatches of the ocean through the trees and guessed they couldn’t be more than a half mile away. There were lights from the docks and store fronts on the water and looking for them was easily distracting. Sheppard could have gotten himself in trouble in a zone without realizing it, trying to get a clearer picture through the fog as they walked, so he had to back off and focus on the trail. Rodney tripped on his boot as a timely reminder not to go chasing after things far away when his partner was trusting him for warning of problems closer at hand.

Thankfully it was only a few minutes hike. John stopped a few times, fussing probably more than he needed to as he helped Rodney with a few unseen drops in the path. Rodney probably could have figured it out, but John knew it would be easier for him to find the natural-hewn steps if he could at least sort-of see another human standing on them. Mostly it gave John an excuse to catch his hand or otherwise touch instead of just feel the weight of fingers on his shoulder or drag at his backpack, because that was inexplicably driving him insane.

He couldn’t even blame it on some Sentinel thing, it was just on himself. Weeks of things going wrong took a toll, especially when John could do nothing but sit on his ass and watch it happen. And then a couple things turned his way and... really, he just wanted to be happy about it, be actively involved in the things that felt good. And who the hell knew why, but Rodney McKay had never let him down. Maybe pissed him off plenty, but he always showed up. The Sentinel ProX thing sucked, but maybe it would work out. Thanks to Rodney and his damn Hail Mary-timing.

When they got to the more lighted area near the secluded campus, John stepped in behind Rodney, looping a finger in the shoulder strap of the man’s backpack. Rodney should be able to see now, so he could lead the way for a bit; John wanted a shield from the brightness of the buildings around the parking lot after having amped up his senses on the walk.

By the time he adjusted, Blair held open the front door of a two-story building that looked like something Frank Lloyd Wright would have dreamed up in a ski-lodge, all stone and glass and at right angles with wood beams. In the daylight, it probably disappeared into the trees of the preserve, but at night, it glowed with soft white LED light from the sconces reflecting from within.

Inside it looked like every other dorm John had seen in his life, except the floor was wood, no carpet, and the furniture was some sort of minimalist modern crap with no padding at all. And, he noticed promptly, all he could smell was the wood walls and the ocean outside.

“Are you shitting me?” he blurted, momentarily too surprised to believe what he was feeling. It was like nearly everything he had been clouded with for the last month had stopped. He felt... normal. Even the up-tight, permanent tension in Ellison’s shoulders had visibly relaxed in the room.

“What?” asked Rodney. John had startled him.

“They... Sentinel-proofed it,” Sheppard said lamely, not sure how to explain the sudden difference he was physically feeling in the room. Rodney looked to Blair for a more coherent explanation. Blair just nodded at them.

“Walls are soundproof, all natural materials. No synthetic smells. Textured wall coverings to help reduce echo. The electricity in this building has been stepped down by nearly half, and everything is shielded to reduce static noise. No fibers in common areas...” Blair rattled off the different building accommodations by memory. He had probably had something to do with the entire design.

“Think we could get Atlantis to take notes?” John asked, not even paying attention to the fact that he was in a public place. He was too busy enjoying the first sense of peace he had felt in a month. Rodney shot him a look for it but it was clear the man wasn’t quite as impressed with the place. Blair had an entire conversation with somebody tucked away in the office at the back of the lobby and John didn’t hear more than a few words, though that was mostly because he was trying to ignore them.

Quiet. He had actual quiet. It didn’t matter that the seats in the lobby were just glorified park benches, he could have sat himself down and taken a nap just to enjoy it. And he wasn’t even tired.

Blair kept his volume down as he handed them the keycards. “This building’s got five units. The three upstairs are for your team. We’ll shuffle things around a little to get Stiles and Derek in here tomorrow so Carson can keep an eye on them.”

John took his card, noted the room number printed on it like some fancy hotel key. “So we’re done for the day?”

“Done. Go take a break. Tomorrow’s gonna suck,” said Jim. Considering the source, it was more or less a promise, and the guy wasn’t exactly giddy about it.

“Can you tell Carson to bring my stuff when he comes back? Radio won’t reach to Colorado,” said Rodney quickly.

“Yeah. That,” seconded John. “I reek.”

“ _You_ reek? I’m still bloody. I would like to not be,” Rodney cut in. As if John was not already acutely aware.

“There’s showers in the room,” said Blair, being his usual helpful.

“That’s entirely beside the point,” replied Rodney. John patted him on the shoulder at the familiar whine.

“McKay has reached his human interaction limit for the day,” he explained, not exactly apologizing but amusedly reminding his new Guide not to be rude to their trainers on the first day. Rodney looked momentarily about to argue, reconsidered, and then withdrew the raised hand about to flick Sheppard’s arm.

“That’s... not wrong,” he allowed.

“I hear that,” said Ellison. He tugged at Blair’s arm. “Let’s go, Chief.”

There were no promises to behave, only assurances that they’d be alive before eight AM. And Ellison looked right at John when he strongly suggested a full eight hours of sleep before then. It was probably less of a buzzkill curfew than it was a reminder that tomorrow would suck harder without it. John was still too wired to sleep, but by his watch, they had a few hours.

The sensory peace of the lobby was still in place upstairs, and John happily listened to Rodney complain about the stairs all the way up. It wasn’t a surprise that they had been given two cards to the same room and Sheppard wasn’t intending to complain to management.

Their room was just a dorm room with a bathroom, nothing fancy except the part where John could still rely on his senses without sorting through a wall of static. The window shade was open enough for some light for Rodney to see his way inside and dump his pack on one of the beds that lined the two walls.

“Cozy,” he muttered. “Where’s the light switch?”

“Inna minute,” replied Sheppard, not even bothering to look for it. He pulled on Rodney’s arm just enough to draw his attention back. “We started something a few hours ago and I wasn’t done.”

Rodney stared at him, blinking as he caught up to the words. And to the fact that John stood in front of him far closer than their usual arguing distance.

“This is a thing now?” he asked. “Really, you and- and me-” He sounded surprised and it stuck in John’s head. It was a bonus, a loophole that worked in his favor on something he had written off as impossible long ago. And he didn’t want to push it.

“It’s got my vote if it’s got yours,” he replied. “This is the only part of the damn manual that I didn’t hate.”

“ _I’m_ not in the manual.”

“Well, not at the time,” Sheppard replied, flustered to make words work. “But then you... you volunteered. Sentinel Project protocols mean I can kiss you on the White House lawn if we want and I don’t lose my job. I get Atlantis. I get you. Jury’s still out on my _sanity_ , but in the meantime, I win.”

Rodney nodded vaguely. “Statistically, you’ve lost more times than I have, And you forfeited the last chess game, so _I_ win.”

“Different things, Rodney,” John said, somehow annoyed and amused at the same time. “And it wasn’t a forfeit.”

Rodney grinned back at him. “You left the table first. Didn’t come back to the game. Fore- _fit_.”

“Rodney. That’s cheating...”

“Nope. This is,” he said. It was a playful warning that surprised John as much as Rodney’s hands tangling in his shirt to pull him bodily into a kiss. A proper one, too, not the tease from the base that afternoon.

When tongues got involved, John’s insides somehow kicked him in the back of the legs and they gave out. He sagged back against the door to tug Rodney in closer without potentially embarrassing himself by falling. The door propped him up nicely and John started exploring the hem of Rodney’s shirt as the man took full control with a kiss.

John Sheppard had enjoyed a pretty packed dance card for most of his life, he wasn’t bashful, but this was new. Very _new_.

“Holy crap,” he breathed out when Rodney let them come up for air. It went straight to McKay’s ego and John knew instantly he was going to regret that later somehow, but it worked to get Rodney to kiss him again, so his pride would take the blow when it caught up. John levered against the door to try to stand up again but Rodney edged a knee between his and stepped easily between. John had hands on bare skin under Rodney’s shirt and didn’t mind the closer hold at all, just found new places to explore.

The moment Rodney’s hand touched bare skin under _John’s_ shirt, however, John _thunked_ his head against the door as his hips twitched. It was like a hot shock through his system and John was an instant fan.

But it was all bizarrely new. Not _new_ like he was a teenager again and didn't already know exactly what he was doing, but _new_ like the Sentinel stuff was screwing with his senses, kinda _new_.

ProX had screwed with his sense of touch and taste and everything else, and he had thought he was used to being _wrong_ at everything he thought he knew after a month. And now it was very definitely on overdrive.

John was all but panting to catch his breath and stay silent as it was, and they were barely past the baseline. He held Rodney by the hips to put the welcome torture on pause as he tried to figure out how to regain control of senses apparently determined to kill him.

"John?" Rodney was very quiet for once. Thank _everything_ holy everywhere.

"New things."

"What."

John shook his head. "Ever wondered how a computer feels when you do a hard reboot? That's... this. Everything off and then very, _very_ on."

"Oh boy." Rodney held his hands lighter and snuck them into more carefully neutral territory. That was not at all what John wanted. That was the opposite of what he wanted.

"Screw it," John decided. They had the whole damn building to themselves for exactly one night only. He was not going into some Sentinel thing like a blushing virgin on Prom night, but he wouldn't be surprised to be left howling because of his senses later and that was _not_ allowed when the rest of his team was within easy hearing range.

"Excuse me?" Rodney asked, not sure how to interpret the oath. John almost told him it was an invitation but he was too frustrated with himself. Instead, he managed to get his leg to remember what muscles existed for and forced himself to stand on his own. He squirmed out of his shirt, a little difficult in close quarters between Rodney and the door thanks to the brace on his wrist, but he managed.

"Wanna try some science, Dr. McKay? If I completely lose it like I think I'm gonna, _then_ you win," John said. Rodney licked his lips and his eyes scanned down the bare chest just barely not under his hands. He hung onto John's belt like there was a risk John was going to sneak off. A tiny frown tugged between his brows as he looked back up at John's face.

"Where's the other tattoo? You said you had one before-" he broke off as John laughed, surprised by the question. John smiled, kissed him, and pushed him gently toward the bed.

"That's the science," he teased. "You gotta _find_ it."

*~*~*

Somehow, in less than three hours, Rodney had learned more about John Sheppard than he’d ever considered possible in the two years they had been teammates and friends. So much more, quantitative and surprisingly qualitative. And that was factoring in the ridiculous mental storehouse of Sheppard-adjacent trivia Rodney had already stored in his brain.

He had been keeping track for a year, and it wasn’t really until Arcturus had blown up in their faces that Rodney had figured out exactly why he had been paying attention to another human’s habits and preferences, and then it was too late anyway. Ignoring Sheppard’s Kirk complex for hooking up with every alien female they met, the Air Force was a very insurmountable issue. Or it had been.

And after Arcturus, there were long weeks where the constant competitive flirting about every small thing had all but disappeared. John let him earn trust back, like he promised, and the Daturan experience had mostly repaired what Rodney had blown up, but it had left John Sheppard... strangely broken. Rodney knew it _wasn’t right_ back then, but now he had a better idea of how hard it had hit him.

John was having to learn a whole new way of existing in his own skin. Mentally maybe he hadn’t changed, but physically, he didn’t have more than a spark of control anymore. Rodney had _witnessed_ it up close and unguarded. It was like he was rebuilding synapses and connections after an injury, but nothing was injured. It was just _new_.

And he slept like the dead, but his fingers twitched along the blanket and unerringly found some part of Rodney to touch before they would be still again. He had woken Rodney up twice because of it and at five AM, Rodney gave up. He silently reconsidered the wisdom of squishing the two twin beds together in the middle of the room because he did need sleep, too, but _god_ did Sheppard need sleep. Rodney let him touch but was very careful not to touch back so he didn’t risk waking him up.

When he was awake, a simple touch had seemed to cause pain from the way John reacted, but he swore up and down that it wasn’t pain. Just _intense_.

It was a huge help to Rodney’s ego - not that he _needed_ it - but the logic of what had to be going on in order for John to be experiencing that still stuck out to him. There was a lot going on with his favorite lieutenant colonel, and John was still adjusting, a whole month later.

It would take more than a week of the Project’s training for Sheppard to calm down and get back to normal. And if it meant a few more nights of seeing John happily shocked and pushing for some kind of personal high, McKay could get on board with the wait. Atlantis, though, was a different story.

As if John had heard him thinking about the city, the man rolled on his side, sliding his hand over Rodney’s back, without seeming to wake up. Rodney lifted up on his elbows a little, peeking at John’s face to be sure he was still asleep. Still passed out, with his hair all over the place.

Rodney looked again at the tattoo he had found hours earlier, the white-inked compass rose on John's ribs along his right side. It flew silently under the radar of the Air Force’s regulations on tattoos, nothing at all objectionable and hardly even visible because John had been so long out of the sun. John could play by the rules even as he told them to fuck right off.

The compass fit neatly under Rodney’s palm, but the two smaller four-point stars angled off the northern arrow point of the compass weren’t so easy to hide there. Rodney had to crawl his fingers to find them and discovered John was ticklish just there. The dodging smile lit up his face through the oh-shit response of his surprised senses.

“What’s this, hmm,” Rodney had teased, very carefully quiet.

John met his eyes then. “Second star to the right, straight on till morning,” he replied, calm again. And he had lowered his arm to trap Rodney's hand there as he went in for another kiss, just short of shaking from the contact of a hand at his ribs.

Simply exploring and kissing and touching was hot. And tiring. They _played_ until John was exhausted from fighting the zone out, and Rodney was one wrong head-turn away from a headache that would make him sour and growly when he didn't want to be. Considering Rodney was afraid to touch the other man for fear of hurting him, when Sheppard was hardly fragile, they were going to have to go slow for a while anyway. Just for both of their sakes.

And now Rodney was awake with nothing to do because he didn't want to wake up the Lost Boy sleeping next to him. Factoring in that simple consideration, of putting John's need for sleep over his own, was a whole other kind of weird for him. He set his head on his crossed arms and stared out the little crack of window visible under the lowered shade. The parking lot lights had shut off, so the sun would be up before long. He couldn't reach the window to pull the blackout curtains closed without getting out of bed, so John would just have to tolerate the daylight wake up call.

It startled him when he felt the canvas-wrapped arm brace tap clumsily at his shoulder and he turned his head to see John squinting at him, not awake, but looking for him.

"Mer, c'mere," John muttered at him, tugging at him to get him to move. "Too far."

"I am not," Rodney replied, arguing out of habit to the surprised reaction caught out by John sleepily defaulting to a nickname Rodney still wasn't keen on having passed around.

"Too," said John. And rather than argue about it, he moved to curl against Rodney's side. Rodney waited for the inevitable hiss and groan - _oh god_ \- as John's stomach and chest leaned up against his back and shoulder, in full skin-to-skin contact that had earlier nearly sent John right over into a zone. But John stayed quiet. Instead, he just kissed the healing scar on Rodney's shoulder and tucked his head to his back like Rodney somehow made a good body pillow set.

They were going to have to have a chat about personal sleeping space to find a way Rodney could actually get rest, too. Later. When John was awake. In the meantime, Rodney rearranged his _actual_ pillow under him and settled in to wait it out.

A minute or two later, he was asleep.

*~*~*


	24. Chapter 24

"Rodney. Wake up," John said, sleepy but awake enough thanks to the sunlight in his eyes.

"I am awake," replied Rodney, the words slurred lazily. " _You_ wake up."

John sat on the bed beside him, actually fully upright, and looked down at where Rodney still cuddled his pillow, eyes only half open. John flicked his ear, then poked his finger at whatever part of his face he could playfully reach. Rodney looked up at him enough to glare and swatted his hand away.

"I mean it, wake up," John insisted lightly. "I wanna try something."

Hook sufficiently baited, Rodney propped himself up on an elbow to look at him, a suspicious furrow to his brow. "What kinda something," he asked.

"The kinda something I figure you want to participate in," replied John. "It involves water. And me not zoning out in it." He glanced at his watch. "And we have fifteen minutes."

That worked. Rodney not only cleared the bed so John didn't have to climb over him, he disappeared into the bathroom to start the hot water going. Just like that. Easy. He heard Rodney swear under his breath at the cupboards in the bathroom as he sorted through them. He had found the towels by the time John sauntered in to help.

John unfastened the wrist brace and left it by the towels. Where it stayed for ten minutes as he enjoyed a rather intense shower, and did his very best to pay Rodney back for the night before despite being down one hand, and holding off a zone as he tried to track a dozen different personal sensations at once, and Rodney.

No zones, no slipping in the tight space of the shower, and John had still nearly made Rodney shout a few things, so he counted it as a win so far. All in all, a very good way to start the day.

He was just tying his boot - damn wrist brace in the way again - when there was a knock on the door. Equally dressed and ready to go, Rodney looked up, startled from searching his backpack for more food.

"It's just Blair," John told him. He could easily hear him fidgeting through the door. He finished with his boot and stood, then surveyed the mess they had made of the room. He glanced at Rodney and gestured toward the beds. There was absolutely no way to misinterpret the scene they would be opening the door to.

"You good, with this?" he asked, just checking before potentially offending Rodney's sense of privacy in the room. There was a faint red flush to his face as he considered it, then nodded.

"Yeah," he said, way too casual for it to be genuine. "It's fine."

John smirked at him, stepped over to kiss the man's fuzzy pink jaw, and then moved to get the door. Outside, Sandburg leaned a shoulder against the wall by the door so he wasn't blocking the exit when it opened. Gone were the barely-regulation uniform basics, the man instead in jeans and layers against the coastal weather. He had his usual smile and offered a small wave. Blair looked rested, healthier still than he looked the day before after his own hospital stay. And the guy was sharp, looking from John's wet, spiky hair, to the redecorated room behind him.

"Ready for week-one rolled into day-one?" he asked, the apology buried under a false cheerfulness.

That didn't sound great. Rodney showed up at John’s shoulder.

" _Week one_..." he began.

Blair nodded. "Just gonna... run you through everything. While we've got access to the campus. If any problem spots jump out, we can work on it when we've got the time to kill at Atlantis."

It made sense. John glanced at Rodney to shore himself up before he nodded. The two of them could figure it out. "That's why today's gonna suck, huh?"

"Yeah... Jim really hates week one," said Blair. "But you'll be fine. Nobody's gonna die. It's just... work."

"I _might_ die unless I get breakfast," Rodney announced. "So as long as there's plenty of food, I can work."

Blair laughed quietly at that and waved toward the stairs. "The kitchen is downstairs."

John stepped back as Rodney crowded the door. "There's a _kitchen_ here? This whole time? I'm starving and I could have had food."

He pushed past John and trotted toward the stairs. He apparently trusted the promise that nobody was going to die today and had his priorities well in line. Blair looked from Rodney to John, surprised but amused. He shook his head.

"That's gonna be on you, man. Your super-sniffer just _failed_ him," Blair said, the joking observation probably very true. John rolled his eyes and stepped out to close up their room.

"How was I supposed to know there was a kitchen?" he asked. "We didn't get the tour."

"How do you think he's gonna find it?" Blair replied. "Use your nose, duh."

Rodney's voice echoed up from the lower landing. "Are you coming or not?"

"Yeah, yeah." John considered stalling just to torment his friend but decided against it. Blair followed behind, a little slower, as John moved briskly to follow after Rodney. He found him restlessly waiting a few steps from the first floor, waving John down as a hint to hurry up. There was a faint smell of food just starting to cook somewhere in the building and John saw an easy show-off opportunity that would get Rodney's feathers ruffled. He caught up and snagged Rodney's hand, leading the way by following the smell of eggs on a frying pan.

It was a game, not a test, but John still delivered Rodney to the kitchen on the first try. Not that the building was very big, but there were still a lot of doors they could have wasted time knocking on. Instead, he turned Rodney loose on the right door and a fully stocked kitchen with assorted cafe tables and chairs to accommodate the crowd that wasn't there yet.

"Gentlemen," greeted Jim Ellison. He was looking rather domesticated suddenly, in jeans and a sweatshirt instead of the uniform he had lived in on base. He still looked like a hardass CO that John was disinclined to argue with, but he was clearly making eggs and pancakes, and Rodney just short of _apparated_ at the man's shoulder. He pointed at the sizzling hot plate.

"I don't suppose... is that for everyone?" he asked.

"There's enough for four. Just don't sell tickets or anything and you'll be fine," replied Jim.

"Yes!" Rodney actually patted the man on the shoulder before he realized what he had done and then scuttled away to start searching cupboards. John smirked as he leaned on the countertop bar and watched them. He nodded to Ellison in greeting.

"Is this just part of the hotel service or what?" he asked, curious.

"Hell no," said Jim, shaking his head. "We cleared out the apartment. Even had the power shut off. So we figure we're gonna eat here this week."

Blair sat down in a chair at one of the tables. "I vote Jim cooks this week though. I'm good with that service."

Ellison shrugged. "Fine with me, as long as someone else gets the cleanup."

"There's gonna be, what, nine of us? Cleanup is the easy part." Rodney sat down with a box of cookies and a mug of steaming coffee, wide eyed like he had never seen so much food in his life. After two years of cafeteria buffet, on-demand kitchen cupboards were some kind of luxury. He didn't seem to realize he had just volunteered _himself_ as part of the cleanup crew. The day could suck if it wanted, but Rodney was at least satisfied he wasn't going to starve. John shook his head and went to get himself coffee.

They split up after breakfast, Guides going one way, Sentinels going the other. Ellison was big on staying active as an old man apparently, so they went for another run. Considering John was still in the stinking clothes from the previous two days of running around, it wasn’t ideal, and he missed his shower, but he got the point.

Running was really helpful anyway. He was getting to reestablish his coordination between his brain and the senses he used to figure out the world at a little faster pace, because his view of the world was moving at the same time as the body that had to adjust to brightness, wind, even external temperatures and the internal one. It was a good way to _engage_. Until it was pointed out to him so drastically, he didn’t realize the relevance between his senses and just living.

He hoped he could keep up the running when he got back to the Daedalus and wouldn’t have to get put on lockdown again due to the ship’s reactions to the ATA on ProX. Carson and Blair were going to have to sort that shit out. Fast. Sheppard would drop the idea on Rodney, stick a post-it note on it on his radar, too.

The run took them down to the docks at the edge of the bay, and it did some funny things to John's head. Running on weathered wood plank was nothing like the stone surface of the city's edge back home. He felt the docks move, and he was only three feet from the water below, so it struck him as wrong and unsafe. Atlantis had nearly killed him dozens of times in two years, and Sheppard found himself side-eyeing the safety of a rickety old pier in comparison. The logic-fail was terminal, but John didn't go overthinking it, just put a little extra effort into not turning his ankle.

He followed Jim out on one of the docks and was surprised when Ellison stopped at the end. They stood there a moment, catching their breath, and John felt the cool down start. Maybe they were done, he thought, and let himself relax. Ellison stood on the deck and stared down at the water. Then, finally, he nodded to himself about something and turned back to John.

"Everything on you water proof?" he asked. Sheppard stared back at him. That couldn't be good.

"Technically, _yes_ ," he said, slow and careful because he was not a fan of where that question was going. Jim pointed him toward the water.

"Time for a swim."

"Are you kidding? That's gonna be freezing."

"Yep. It will be."

"Well... couldn't I just... stick my head under?"

Jim nodded again. "Sure. And then I'll shove the rest of you off the dock while you're down there. Seems like the hard way to do it, but if that's how you want to do it..."

He was completely casual about it, no hint of a threat. That order was the whole reason they had gone for the run, not some random whim. Sheppard swore under his breath and knelt to tug at laces to he could start kicking off his boots

"You know, sometimes I wonder if you and Sandburg aren't crazy," he said, just being honest.

"Trust me, he is. The guy trained a monkey to watch TV, so his brain is wired different," replied Ellison, not at all offended. That didn't really make John feel any better as he shoved his socks in his boots and crouched on a dock full of splinters. The wrist brace was taken off and stuffed in the boot so it didn't roll away either. Then he stood and moved to the edge of the pier to assess the water. He glanced back at his trainer on this particular suicide run.

"Was it at least good TV?" he asked, curious and mostly stalling. The wind was cold enough, the water was going to turn him into an icicle and this seemed like a new level of insane.

"Don't remember. I was the lab rat, not the monkey," said Jim. He sighed and finally toed out of his sneakers, tucked them and his socks near enough to John's boots that they were out of the way. Then the man jumped in the water. It was mildly reassuring in that he wouldn't be suffering alone, so John dove in after him.

Oh yeah. Carson was going to kill them for this. The broken wrist thing, Carson was going to have a thing to say about, but he'd just sigh and get over it. _Swimming_ with the broken wrist was going to get him lectured at for at least a half an hour. And the ice cold water? Bad idea. Very bad idea.

"What exactly are we doing, here?" John asked, not shivering yet but expecting to shortly as he tread water with one hand. He had come up for air about ten feet from the pier and not far from Ellison.

"Freezing, first," Jim replied.

"Oh good. As long as that's part of the _plan_ ," said John.

"Yeah, big part." Jim wasn't a naturally talkative sort and John was beginning to doubt his skills as a trainer.

"Sandburg promised nobody was gonna die today," John reminded him. Just trying to be helpful. "So that was nice. He was right... right?"

"Keep it up," Jim said easily. "We can do this every day this week."

John stopped sassing his trainer after that, at peace with the threat because it was only a week. And after the week was up, John would get the satisfaction of revenge, somehow, on his home turf.

And for all it was crazy, and very much insane, there was a point to it. When they were sufficiently frozen, which meant the choppy ocean water had started to feel a little bit less like pins and needles, maybe more numb, they climbed out on the deck again. For a whole new level of hellish cold. Ellison helped since John was very definitely favoring an angry wrist, and then sat him down, shoulder to shoulder on the pier to teach him how to breathe.

When John got actually mad at the fact that he had gotten soaking wet in salty water in order to be taught something he had been doing since the day he was born, Ellison let him have his rant. Waited him out.

"We can't just teach theory on this stuff or it won't stick. Your body won't have anything to respond to, no physical association for taking back control. So. You can sit here and be mad about it, or you can try the technique, see which one works out better for you," Jim said. It wasn't like the man disagreed with anything John had said, but he got the distinct impression Jim had already heard it a few times over suddenly. And, he noticed, Jim had already changed his breathing pattern to the meditative breathing he had told John to try. "But whichever route you go for, pay attention to your body temperature and try to get the dials to take care of what the breathing doesn't."

Soaking wet and freezing, sitting cross legged on the bleached wood deck, Sheppard tried again. Teyla had helped him on the meditation part more than once, and John tried to match her lessons up with what Jim was trying to demonstrate. And he realized that having the all-around freezing feeling hanging on him was making it easier to tie sensations to a mental "dial" than it had been when he was just trying to pick it up as a mental image as he was running around the woods.

John was still freezing. But. He could move. He kept up the deep breathing as he put the brace back on. Dry socks were welcome and the boots almost made him feel warm. None of it should have worked. But it did. He stood when Ellison did.

"Now comes the hard part," Ellison cautioned. "You might not feel the cold, but it's still there. So we hike up, and don't push it. Put the effort into warming up. And mind the dials. Keep things balanced out so you don't hurt yourself."

John followed the man's lead, trying not to overextend or otherwise endanger muscles that had gone from over-warm to freezing cold. And the difference between what he physically _felt_ as he worked his way back up to being able to run, and the absolute lack of predictable control he had felt hours before, - even on the run down,- was night and day.

Tracking his senses was taxing but he didn't get anywhere near a zone out as he followed every hint of pain and lit-up sensation. His jaw chattered as the wind caught his shirt just wrong enough, and he was still cold, but he could control it. As an exercise, the crazy seemed to work.

"I know you were kidding earlier," John said eventually, once their hike had turned into another jog. "But... can we do this again tomorrow morning?"

*~*~*


	25. Chapter 25

**Earth: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado**

“My head hurts.”

“Hurts how?”

Stiles blinked at the return question. Or, more specifically, it’s source. Since when did Derek Hale become an expert on the aches and pains of small, fleshy humans? Stiles’ head hurt in a different place suddenly and he rubbed at his forehead, trying to get a solid answer for Nurse Hale.

“Like... it hurts. Whaddya want?” he asked. Derek poked him carefully between the eyes.

“There?” he asked, before moving the poking finger somewhere slightly different. “Or there? Or...”

Stiles swatted his hand away. He got the picture. So he pointed to his own head (thankyouverymuch) and illustrated the band of pain over his eyes and down his jaw. Derek stood up and lifted the blanket over Stiles’ nose and mouth.

“Try that for a minute,” he said, completely serious and not pranking Stiles by suffocating him with the blanket. Stiles held the blanket over his face, feeling like an idiot, but very unsettled by the unexpected nature of Derek’s help. Derek wasn’t exactly known for a bedside manner.

“Okay but why?” Stiles asked. Derek nodded toward one of the adjoining lab rooms, just an open archway away from them and out of sight.

“That lab tech that walked through decided to marinate in the Axe this morning,” Derek replied. “You made a face when he walked in. Maybe it’s him.”

“Oh.” Stiles blinked to process. “That’s gonna be a thing now?”

Derek looked at him a little strangely. “ _Yes_. That’s a thing now. How many times have me or Scott said something smelled weird? Smells trigger _headaches_. All the time.”

“Oh.” Stiles tried to rearrange the blanket into a better gas-mask style but ran into the predictable trouble of it being ten times bigger than the average bandanna. It scratched like felt and dragged at his face uncomfortably. He reached for the jacket looped over the arm of Derek’s chair. “Gimmie that.”

Derek didn’t argue and handed it over. Stiles held it over his face to hold over his nose and mouth and wrapped the arms around his neck, calling it close enough. Also, it smelled like Derek. He usually didn’t have a smell. Aside from occasionally _wet dog_. Now Stiles smelled Old Spice and popcorn.

“Why does your jacket smell like popcorn?” he asked, his voice comically muffled to his own ears. Derek narrowed his eyes, confused.

“It doesn’t.”

Stiles almost shoved the jacket at him to prove he wasn’t crazy, but his head was already easing up on the ache, so he preferred not-hurting to being right. Carson walked in then, with a paper mug of some kind of herbal tea, and stopped short at the sight of the jacket over half of Stiles’ head. Stiles lifted his hand to point toward the other lab.

“They reek,” he said in explanation. Carson accepted that and handed him the tea.

“Ah. Well, hopefully this doesn’t,” said the doctor. Stiles accepted it and just held it, enjoying the warmth of it even though he wasn’t cold enough to want a blanket over him. The doctor checked on the IV and then stood beside the bed to watch his self-muzzled patient for a moment.

"Colonel Sheppard had the jacket over his whole head half the time," Carson offered up. "An odd tent. This is a better look."

Stiles glanced up at him but didn't move much so he wouldn't dislodge his mask. "It works."

"Aye. We can find ear plugs if you need them, and I'm sure we can fake something for sunglasses," said Carson. "Sounds like the antibiotics are doing the job. Senses are up?"

"Headache," Stiles reported. "And the blanket was scratchy. So this works."

Carson patted Stiles' shoulder and shook his head. "So that's a yes then. Good luck, lad," he said. Like he knew Stiles was going to need it. "Colonel Carter says we'll be heading out in an hour or so. Finish up the tea there and we'll circle up with the others, be ready when the call comes in."

Stiles dragged the jacket off his face and started slurping at the tea. He had to save his new free stuff before it got forgotten in the guest quarters he hadn't been back to yet.

It worked out that Carson had been tasked with collecting McKay and Sheppard’s stuff to take with them. The mess that was McKay’s guest room said the man had planned on returning to Colorado and Stiles felt a little bad that things had gone so sideways for the team. But he didn’t say anything about it, just carried Sheppard’s pack for Carson so he could scrounge up the clothes his friend had left in random places. And books. And charger cords. There were more charge cords than there were visible electronics. Two extra bags had to be carried out and Stiles was glad he had volunteered to take Colonel Sheppard’s.

They met up with Teyla and Ronon in the cafeteria. Even Ronon looked at Stiles funny when he saw the colors on his face.

“How do you look worse today than yesterday?” he wanted to know.

“ _Your face_ hasn’t healed either,” said Stiles, relying very much on Derek’s promise that he could take the big man down if he had to. But Ronon grinned at the joke and clapped Derek on the shoulder in greeting. So they were friends now. That was nice. Stiles relaxed a little.

Another new face was at the table with them, probably another military guy, based on the haircut and baggy pants pockets. He stared curiously between Stiles and Derek from behind nerd-glasses as Carson abandoned them and the bags in search of food. Teyla noticed.

“Daniel Jackson, this is Stiles and Derek. Who I gather will be joining Colonel Sheppard’s team for training at the Sentinel Project,” she said. She seemed pleased to provide the news, but Stiles was surprised she knew it.

“How’d you...” Stiles trailed off, glancing back at Carson in the buffet line as the likely suspect for the _how_. Stiles had apparently been the last one to know about the Sentinel medical mystery, and that wasn’t fair.

Daniel Jackson stood up from his chair to shake their hands, because apparently everyone was going to treat Stiles like an adult so they could treat Derek like one. They had backpacks and duffel bags piled at their feet, so he moved to them.

“Yeah, news travels fast around here,” Daniel said. “It is, quite ironically, not a good place to bring secrets. At least, not the kind without red tape and _Classified_ stamps attached.”

The man looked at Derek as he said it. Stiles looked nervously to Derek himself, not sure if he was allowed to be mad or not on Derek’s behalf. If Carson had told the whole base about the werewolf in their midst, maybe the ‘stick it out with the Air Force’ plan was about to be scrapped.

But the new guy was giving Derek a lot of attention, certainly, and not attacking with knives or silver bullets. Derek just shook his hand and offered his charming smile. The one Stiles had seen him use on the resource officers in the sheriff’s department when they had something he wanted. Derek was mingling, with his stupid attractive face, and not _reacting_ to the military guy who was talking about outed secrets. Stiles wasn’t okay with it.

“Did Rodney survive the wolfsbane?” Stiles asked, keeping it casual despite the very intense frustration he felt. “I think I wanna kill him.”

Derek quickly draped an arm around his shoulders to clamp a hand over his mouth.

“It’s fine,” he said, perfectly lying about it. Or maybe he wasn’t lying, and the panicked heartbeat in Stiles’ ears was his own.

Daniel looked between them, apparently judging the mouthy teen who had _technically_ just threatened to kill someone who was probably a friend. It was kinda a bad habit that could bite him in the ass on an Air Force base. Stiles remembered suddenly that he was very bad at the basic necessities of self-preservation.

“Sorry,” he said, quieter but not necessarily calmer. “It was a joke... just... don’t.” Stiles made himself stop talking before he backed himself into more of a corner than they already were. Teyla stepped in - like she had when Stiles went after Carson on the plane, - and leaned to catch Stiles’ hand and pull his attention.

“Stiles, have you eaten a meal yet?” she asked, gently steering him back out of his worry for Derek. Stiles nodded.

“Breakfast.”

“Well, now it is lunch. Leave your things. Go with Carson to bring back food,” she told him.

Stiles took the excuse she offered and went to get himself some kind of food to shove in his mouth. Derek, however, sat down in the empty chair near the abandoned bags. He was making a point and Stiles was supposed to pay attention. It was weird to think that Derek was the one trying to clean up after Stiles’ messes for a change, but Stiles knew that was exactly what he was doing as he tried to strike up a non-violence-based conversation with Jackson.

Carson saw Stiles show up at the buffet and waved him over. He had taken so long because he was trying to juggle three trays of food. Stiles felt somehow worse suddenly for snapping at the doctor’s friends.

“Everyone’s gonna leave Derek alone, right?” Stiles asked him.

“They’ve no reason not to,” said Carson. “He doesn’t seem to start trouble.”

Stiles actually laughed at that, nearly choking on the grape he had just popped into his mouth from one of the trays he had taken over from Carson. The doctor thumped him on the back a few times to make sure he kept breathing, but he was fine.

“You have my word, as much as I’m able, I protect my patients. And your friend there was a patient before you. If he were under any threat, he wouldn’t be here,” Carson assured him.

“Feels like he is,” Stiles muttered. He watched some sort of stew get plopped on a plate. Carson steered Stiles’ tray toward the stack of fried chicken instead of the stew, advising to avoid the spices.

“Maybe Dr. Sandburg will have answers that will make ye feel better,” Carson said. “So try not to think on it just now. Maybe in an hour, you’ll know more.”

Patience wasn’t Stiles’ strong suit. But he managed to take the plate of food for Derek back with his own and sat down between Teyla and Derek so he wouldn’t get in trouble. Daniel Jackson didn’t seem so bad; he was on Colonel Carter’s team, like Teyla and Ronon were on Colonel Sheppard’s team. Not military exactly, just somebody really smart who helped them out. Kinda like Rodney and Blair and their science excursions.

Stiles really owed them an apology. Maybe he just needed to turn himself back in for the Alphas to shove him in a black box again. Call a do-over where he didn’t come back crawling-the-walls paranoid.

Somehow he made it to the plane. Everything was too loud though, and Stiles spent the whole flight to the base buried under Derek’s jacket, with his hands over the sound-dampening ear plugs. Derek sat next to him, reading the book, but not out loud. The engines echoed in Stiles’ brain loud enough that he couldn’t think past the headache, and his ears popping with the elevation change was a special kind of hell. But he survived.

When they landed again, it was noon in California, and way too bright, especially after spending an hour with a jacket over his head. He squinted a little too much because Derek grumbled about it, sighed, and then gave over his sunglasses. The world became slightly less painful after that.

Until the helicopter.

Stiles was far less enthusiastic about Black Hawks than his fourteen-year-old self would have approved of.

“Can I have one of those tranquilizers again?” Stiles asked as he stared at the noisy machine he was expected to climb into.

“No,” said Carson and Derek.

“Here,” came the unexpected addition of Daniel Jackson. He handed Stiles an older iPod and a pair of over-the-ear headphones. “Sorry. I didn’t have the headphones on the plane. Sam- Colonel Carter borrowed them from the base here.”

Stiles stared at it, not sure adding more sound would really help his problem. Daniel seemed to realize there was a disconnect.

“Oh... sorry. Not for music,” Daniel clarified. “I mean, there’s music on it, but that won’t help you.”

He held it so Stiles could easily see what he was up to and turned the iPod on and switched through the settings until he found the AM/FM radio app. “Find a static station and use the white noise. It helps counter the frequency of the other sounds. Even the chopper, to a degree.”

That sounded reasonably scientific enough to try. Stiles took the offered iPod and started playing with the headphones.

“How’d you know about it?” he asked. Daniel shrugged.

“I read Sandburg’s academic thesis on Sentinel when it leaked. It’s been a few years, but I remembered the frequency thing from it because of some work I was doing with... some Egyptian temples at the time,” he said, not being entirely truthful. Stiles frowned at the evade but didn’t say anything.

“There’s been more research since, too, that backs up what Sandburg had in the thesis,” Daniel added. “So I’m thinking this should help.”

Stiles accepted it with a nod and ducked into the headphones. The trick actually helped cut the sharp stabbing in his head straight between his eyes, so Daniel’s idea worked out. He could hear the static, but it was quiet, and it took the edge off all other noises that made it through the headphones. Maybe he needed to rethink his policy on dealing with adults.

Stiles then spent the helicopter ride listening to the white noise static of an iPod radio and slouched up against Derek in tight quarters at the back of the helicopter. At least neither of them were bleeding this time.

*~*~*

**Earth: Marin County, California**

The morning passed quickly enough, but it was just a lot of reiterating what Rodney had figured out while reading the book. The Sentinel shift was an important thing to prepare for, but it wasn't as mentally stimulating as any of the dozen projects Rodney could have been working on at Cheyenne.

Instead, he sat in an actual classroom, with a group of ten others, and watched and listened as Blair and some other lead Guide broke down visual representations of the differences between what the standard human senses could perceive, and what a Sentinel's senses were capable of.

They could see for miles in the rain. They could perceive the tiny sound of a ticking watch as much as half a block away. They could sense multiple frequencies, visual and audio, RF, UV, IR, as echoes and shadows. Even ghosts, if one wanted to believe in them as something science couldn't otherwise explain through frequency and elemental interference. They could touch a pile of dirt and feel the different chemical compounds at work. A Sentinel was a walking crime lab, but that didn't help Rodney much unless John could figure out how to see things at the microscopic level and project them for Rodney to be able to read.

Rodney very nearly asked if falling down from a kiss was within the range of normal sensory amplification but caught himself before he could overshare. If the Guide teaching the very public class didn't bring it up as relevant, McKay would have to figure it out on his own. He was sure he could repeat the experiment to find out. If he couldn't, his ego was going to take a few hits, and statistically that could lead to performance issues and surely that wasn't ideal for either of them...

Rodney was quite distracted in Guide class and suddenly realized how glad he was to have never dated until after completing university.

Somehow he struggled through the examples, and through the hands-on portion, where the Guides had to test their own different sensory capabilities. It was for understanding, comprehension, and so that they could help their partners keep track of any changes in their senses. Because that was something to watch out for; sudden spikes and fluctuations in their abilities could be signs of problems, just like anybody else, but with Sentinel, there was less time to act. Problem interactions could lead to a loss of a sense of taste or sight or smell or touch, and they had to be identified early in order to remove the problem before it caused damage. This stuff was actually important and Rodney committed at least half of his brain power to it. The other half was... definitely distracted. That was irritating.

McKay was actually grateful when Blair collected him from the lab and they left the room. "Colonel Carter's on the way."

"Oh! Good. Thank god. You're telling us to smell things, and all I can smell is the clothes I've worn for two days. And every one of those Marines thinks I'm some kind of hobo," Rodney said.

Blair smiled at that. "It's day one, so I'm betting Sheppard doesn't look much better. Jim gets into the field work pretty heavy right up front."

"Field work?"

"Sentinel senses are honed by their exposure to nature. There's always something going on. So he... well, literally has them in the mud for some of it," said Blair. "Lots of trying to get the brain and body working together."

"Oh, great. I'll get my stuff back and there's gonna be a line for the shower," Rodney realized.

He pouted about it until they got outside, and Blair wanted to wait for Jim to show up. It was after noon and the fog had burned off, replaced by muggy heat and sunshine. Not terrible, but annoying. Rodney fidgeted with the notebook he had been given, because he had his tablet but after two days it had no power and he had left the chargers and extra batteries in Colorado. He heard the sound of running boots on pavement and looked up to see Ellison and Sheppard running up the road from the campus parking lot.

"Oh god," he muttered under his breath at the sight. John - the very same one Rodney had been daydreaming about on accident for the last two and a half hours - had given up on his shirt over the course of whatever they had been doing and it was tied to a belt loop like a flag. He had been in the sun for a while and was apparently not a man cursed to sunburn in the amplified danger zone of sporadic cloud cover. And he was wet. Why the hell was he wet? And how was his hair still spiky?

John saw him and smirked, which only made it worse, and Rodney quickly stared down at the notes in his hand, even though he couldn't focus on a single word. He looked up when John got there, and was suddenly in his space. Rodney leaned in for a kiss without thinking and realized very quickly why John looked wet.

"What- why- you smell like the docks..." he spluttered. Saltwater and seaweed and dead animals. Fish. The dead, smelly kind. "What the hell were you playing in?"

John just shrugged it off. "I like the ocean."

"No kidding," said Rodney. He inched a little further out of John's space. Because John was John, he responded by catching Rodney's elbow and tugging him back a step again. Rodney rolled his eyes and held a hand over his nose as he suddenly missed the smell of blood from his own shirt collar. "Do you even know what you smell like? Why haven't you zoned out on _this_?"

John's smile went megawatt. "Dials work now."

Jim raised a hand, wobbled it back and forth. "He's better."

"Oh, good..." Rodney again almost asked about falling-down ratios but the smell between the two of them currently kept him pretty well grounded.

"So what's up, Chief?" Ellison asked his partner. Blair nodded off toward the helicopter pad.

"Colonel Sheppard's team is coming in. I figured they could take an hour or so," said Blair. Jim nodded.

"When?" asked John. He glanced down at himself and then over at the round building that was their dorm at the end of the lot. Blair checked his watch.

"Probably about five minutes," he said. John decided to don his shirt then.

"I guess I can show up like this, as long as we're not standing on ceremony," he said, shrugging into the damp black shirt awkwardly with the brace on his wrist. Rodney very intentionally looked away to Sandburg.

"I thought Sam was going to pass on training?" he asked. Blair shrugged.

"She said something came up so her planned mission got put on hold. She's coming out to get with the lab, with Carson," he said. The lab? Meaning the genetics lab?

"Wait- the lab... Can I-"

"You're busy this afternoon," said Ellison, interrupting the question before Blair might have had a chance to approve it. "And we should get going. The chopper won't be far out."

Rodney sighed and resigned himself to missing out on the actual kind of science that could get his brain back on track as they headed for the trail up to the top of the ridge. They fell in line behind their Sentinel trainers and John took up the last, behind Rodney, to randomly catch his belt when he tripped. But he backed off again when they got to the chopper pad, stood a respectable distance away in light of the fact that the both of them probably stunk to high heaven.

It was another drop-and-run landing, but this time there were six people off-loading. It wasn’t a surprise to see Daniel Jackson follow Sam off the chopper, but Rodney didn’t know what the SG-1 anthropologist was there for. It took a minute, but the Stiles kid and his werewolf buddy trailed out behind Sam. Stiles had headphones on, and an iPod in his hand, which Rodney looked at Carson for a little funny. The kid also carried a couple of backpacks on his shoulder, and Rodney hoped one of them was his.

As the helicopter pulled back up into the air, Stiles marched a backpack over to Sheppard, while Carson and the werewolf approached Rodney. Both of Rodney's bags were dropped at his feet, and he did remember to mutter his thanks even as he tried to figure out how he was going to get them both down the ridge again. Still, he looked up at Carson, confusion winning out over logistics for the moment.

"Why'd you take John's earwig if the kid gets an iPod?" McKay asked Carson.

"Hello, Rodney," said Carson, with the long-suffering sigh of patience for his friend's attention span. "I didn't give Stiles the iPod, you would have to ask Dr. Jackson." He turned to the werewolf briefly. "As I've gathered you hadn't been introduced properly, Derek Hale, meet Dr. Rodney McKay. Rodney, behave yourself this time."

"Oh come on, I was _perfectly_ behaved," complained Rodney. He looked uncertainly to Derek for backup. "I was just surprised, is all. And poisoned. Do we need to mention that?"

Derek offered an awkward smile but he seemed okay with it. "Thanks for helping us," he added. That surprised Rodney, as he recalled being a lot of not-help in the grand scheme of things, but he would take his accolades when he was due them.

"Sure, it was no problem," he said. He figured that was maybe a promise not to do anything weird, like bite him, but didn't see any wisdom in clarifying just then. What exactly did one say to werewolves, anyway? He looked between Derek and Stiles as Sheppard walked up with the younger one. “Everyone better now?”

“Define _better_ ,” said Stiles. The teen was wearing shades that didn’t seem right on his face. Rodney remembered the miserable mess the kid had been at the preserve and now... Stiles seemed the same, just _more_ colorful.

“No arrow holes or poisons?” asked Rodney. He looked to Derek, confused as to how the young man figured they had helped anything.

"Those are better," Stiles allowed. He looked between Rodney and John with a visible squint on his face, like he was in pain. "But you guys reek and I've got a headache. And that's new, so it's not better."

"Yeah, _new_ takes some getting used to," offered Sheppard soberly. "But you'll catch on quick here. These guys are good."

All the same, Rodney noticed, John edged closer to him and away from Stiles to give the kid a break. He picked up Rodney's duffel bag and slung it over a shoulder already weighted down with a backpack, and Rodney floundered, too distracted to figure out how to complain about the help. Teyla approached them for a greeting but John self-consciously kept even her at arm's length. She looked to Rodney and smiled, caught at his hand briefly. He was glad to see her but pulling his attention in too many directions.

"You are well, Rodney? You seem much more yourself," she said, her smile twisting up on one side like she knew things. Rodney nodded, thrown off slightly wondering what she had figured out.

"It's good. I'm good..." he managed.

"Let's head in," said Sheppard, circling a hand in the air and pointing toward the trail. "Watch your step. And Ronon, no hunting here. There's rules."

Ronon scoffed something that sounded like "Figures" but followed Sheppard. Rodney picked up his backpack and shrugged into it, falling in the trail line-up behind the werewolf. He glanced back at the chopper pad, where Sam and Ellison were standing patiently by as Blair Sandburg and Daniel Jackson talked animatedly about Earth's ancient cultures and Sentinel tendencies and the like. It was a conversation Rodney was glad to pass on, but he still felt like he was missing out. The anthropological soft-sciences weren't exactly his thing, but Smart People were talking, and he wanted to know things, too. Rodney let it go and focused on the trail.

*~*~*


	26. Chapter 26

The addition of Sam Carter and Daniel Jackson caused some unexpected rearranging of Sandburg’s planned room assignments, but within a half hour of their arrival, Sheppard’s team and their teenaged extras were all set for at least the week. Ronon instantly complained about the unnatural quiet in the building and Teyla somehow found it a reason to talk more softly than her usual inside.

There would be some details to take care of on Stiles Stilinski because he was a minor, and technically they were harboring a runaway. But Blair and Jim were going to skate by on that as long as possible because no one wanted to risk taking the teen back to Beacon Hills until he wasn’t fighting headaches and crazy senses. Sheppard knew personally what kind of hell the whacked senses could unleash and he figured the kid had a hard enough time without adding Alpha bad-guys and shitty foster parents to the equation.

While Sheppard was glad to have the gang back together, he was also quite happy to shut himself away in his own room as everyone got settled in their respective corners. It had been a long, physically demanding few hours, and his skin itched from whatever was in the algae bloom he had stupidly swam through little more than an hour earlier. To say nothing of the smell. Dead fish and seaweed was not his preferred aftershave.

Rodney had followed John into their room, probably following the duffel he carried more than actually chasing John himself. It was placed carefully on the bed for safe retrieval before John started trying to peel his backpack away from his salt-crusty shirt. Rodney helped, which was nice of him, and then grabbed him at the hips to turn him around, which was unexpected and hit John’s amped-up sense of touch just right to stop his breath.

“Hi, Rodney,” John managed, just barely, before he was being thoroughly kissed. Despite the fact that he smelled like dead fish. John was proud of himself for keeping his legs under the rest of him this time.

“There,” said Rodney when they broke for air again. He unfortunately let go of John to let him move again, not that it was necessary. “Had to get that out of my system.”

John blinked, trying to catch up. “Anytime,” he said, distracted despite himself suddenly. He’d had a very simple plan of attack when he walked in the room and now it was getting cloudy with side-quests.

“Go take a shower. You seriously smell like dead fish,” Rodney all but ordered. It dragged a laugh from John as Rodney turned away to dig through his luggage for clean clothes that hadn’t been tainted by blood and damp sea water. At least Rodney was his usual self.

The lieutenant colonel did as the civilian ordered and headed for the shower. It was a pristine, echoing tile shower, but John tried to listen to the water fall and reach past the reverb of the space for what had become a familiar sound the past few days. John just had to know what he was looking for in order to find it, and now had little trouble reaching for the sound of Rodney’s heartbeat a room away.

He was physically tired, though, and the water added to that. Three minutes was the most he could manage before the shower became more painful than helpful and John figured he had pushed things enough. He found his towel and was careful stepping out onto the flagstone bathroom floor. John padded his way out to the bedroom area again and sat himself down on the edge of the bed.

Rodney had changed clothes by then, his hair messed up from the apparently valiant battle he'd had with a shirt. He stared out the window and didn't notice John was back, in his own little zone out, until John started digging through his own backpack for clothes. Rodney looked over at John, his eyes widening when he saw the undressed state of the man seated next to him in his birthday suit and a towel.

"This is not fair," Rodney announced. John smirked at him, shrugged.

"No take-backs," he reminded.

"No take-backs," replied Rodney. He waved a hand vaguely toward John. "But I... you don't understand. I almost asked Katie to _marry_ me. And... just... it wasn't this."

John sobered slightly and nodded. "Woulda sucked. Atlantis is my ship. _I_ would have had to officiate. _And_ buy you a beer. Insult to injury."

"You could have, _I_ don't know, _said_ something," said Rodney.

"I _did_ say something. When you brought in the _loophole_ ," said John, nodding. "Before that, with all the Kirk-crap you tossed around, I figured you were good with the Katies and Sams of the galaxy."

Rodney rolled his eyes and shrugged. "Look, if it's hot, and it's breathing, I'm probably into it. _Including_ aliens. I'm just usually _into it_ from the other side of a computer screen, that's all. Where I can close the program."

That was surprising and John looked over at him, feeling his understanding of Rodney shift a little. "I normally go for one or the other but whatever works for you, buddy. Aliens are a tad overrated though, let’s maybe leave them off the list."

"Show off," muttered Rodney. John sat up a little straighter, flexed tired and ignored muscles to show off some more. Rodney lightly backhanded him in his weeks-out-of-shape chest, the faint sting making him reflexively curl away as he grinned. John still caught his hand and held it there, a little possessive.

"We gonna be professionals in the daytime or take advantage of the lunch break properly?" he asked, still amused. Rodney shook his head.

"Professionals. Otherwise I won't be able to focus on anything. _At all_. There is not enough math involved here. I was dying this morning," he admitted. "Bad. It was bad."

John wanted to smile at that but he felt responsible for the obvious torment. "Too much voodoo?"

Rodney hemmed and hawed about it but he nodded. John took the hand he held at his ribs and lifted it to set a kiss to the back of Rodney's knuckles. Then he let him have his hand back.

"Professionals it is," said John. "But I've still got to get dressed. So..."

"I can professionally supervise, if you'd like," replied Rodney. If he thought John would back off from putting him through it, he was wrong, and the colonel shrugged and started digging through his pack for clothes again.

"If you say so. But your afternoon is gonna _suck_ ," John warned him. Should make for an interesting evening, though, so Sheppard pulled no punches letting the nerd supervise in a misguided bid to preserve focus. If he could survive locker rooms, McKay could survive his afternoon of Sentinel voodoo-science. Uncomfortably.

Rodney ended up flat on his back staring resolutely at the ceiling before John had even gotten his shirt on. Once he was back in his boots, the only evidence of his shower being the wet hair and the fact that he no longer smelled like fish, his new partner was still pretending to be comatose. John knelt on the edge of the bed to lean over him and peek down at him.

"It's safe now," he said helpfully. Rodney didn't look at all convinced but sat up.

"I am so screwed," John heard him say, just a breath of volume. John still knelt on the bed and towered over him, grinned down at him, smug.

"Not on lunch breaks, anyway," he replied. "We'll see what we can do tonight."

Rodney narrowed his eyes, the stressed expression traded for the much more natural annoyance. "Oh come on! _That_ was hardly professional. I could get HR _all_ over that. I'm not gonna survive as it is."

A knock on the door nearly gave Rodney whiplash and John backed off to let him up. He started for the door and Rodney caught his hand with a "Wait..." He followed John up and caught his belt, leaned in for another sneaky kiss, and then edged by him to get the door himself. John shook his head, amused, and flicked the blankets up in a halfhearted effort to make the room presentable.

"You two ready to get back at it?" came Ellison's voice from the door. Lt. Colonel Sheppard left the mess of the bed and went to report back to work. Rodney blocked the door a moment longer until John poked him in the sides.

"Let's go," he encouraged. McKay managed not to yelp but he jumped as John had been aiming for. Sheppard snuck past him out into the hall as Rodney recovered from the offense.

"What about everyone else?" Rodney asked.

"Sandburg's got them. Stilinski's not in shape to do much yet. So the rest of them are doing the tour and getting Beckett and Carter set up in the lab. Then we'll meet back up later," said Jim.

"We didn't get the tour," said John as they headed down the stairs.

"I want in on the lab," added Rodney. Jim nodded.

"After this. If Sheppard handles it alright, I'll get you to the eggheads," said Jim, completely casual.

" _If_?" Sheppard echoed.

Ellison grimaced, offered a slight nod as they hit the lobby. He held the door open for them. "I hate this one," he admitted. "Straight up nightmare fuel so we're not putting the kid through it."

"Nightmare- for _training_?" Rodney slowed down and had caught Sheppard's elbow, concerned enough he seemed to be considering calling the lawyers again. John steered him after Ellison, determined.

"It's fine, McKay. Smart people don't jump in the ocean first thing in the morning, either," he pointed out. Not that he didn't believe Ellison's assessment of the afternoon's task, but it wasn't going to be Rodney doing the heavy lifting on it, either.

Five minutes later, in the basement of one of the larger buildings, Sheppard was beginning to understand why Ellison called it nightmare fuel. They were looking down at a replica of a maze, like the mazes scientists ran lab rats and mice through. Usually there were shock traps and dead drops in the mice versions, but John wasn't seeing any in the labyrinth mock-up in front of them.

"Well, that doesn't seem so bad," Rodney said. "What's a rat maze got to do with the senses?"

"The maze isn't the problem," said Jim. "Anybody can run it. The problem is the environment inside. It's like a carnival fun-house."

"Those are fun," said Sheppard. It was a front and Jim cut him a sidelong glance for it. John tilted his head toward Rodney as a hint and Jim left it alone.

"Well, we're getting it out of the way up front," said Ellison. "I hate this level."

"Saw a sign back down the hall that the gun range is on this level," said Sheppard, a hint that he wanted to stop there on the way out.

"You and Dex will be in there tomorrow, " said Ellison. "Just cool your spurs for now, cowboy."

"Cooling." John nodded, pointed toward the labyrinth in front of him. It was probably cheating, but he was stalling, trying to memorize the routes he could see in the pristine white box. "In a mouse trap."

"Yep."

The labyrinth run didn't start out too bad. The maze was some kind of permanent installation, with solid walls, not like the flimsy pop-up, county-fair fun-houses. John had been to a few of those in his youth, with friends or a girl on his arm. Now he stood by himself in an entryway the size of a closet, waiting for the go-ahead to enter the maze. Rodney had his own entrance to deal with at another point.

They were supposed to find each other and then find their way out. They had even spent a few minutes looking at a 3D map. How hard could it be?

Suddenly the lights in the waiting room went out. A computerized voice from somewhere further inside the maze said "Go." And it was the eeriest spot John Sheppard had found himself in for quite some time. He wasn't in danger, but... what the actual hell was he doing?

There had been no doorknobs in the entry cubby before the lights went out, and none presented themselves in the darkness. Great. It was one of _those_. John dialed up his vision and touch, countering it with going down on two others; he wasn't likely to go around licking or smelling the walls of a maze so the compensation balance was supposed to make things work better. And John knocked on the wall in front of him. It didn't sound hollow like a door, so he tried the narrow wall to his left. There was a slight echo and give, and glancing down, he saw a sliver of light along the floor. Sneaky. John gave a solid push and the door swung in.

The next hallway was narrow, like the door, with black walls and day-glo splashes that played havoc with John's focus. The neon-on-dark had a faint static outline no matter how John tried to adjust, so he tried to ignore the walls and stick to moving forward. Another left and the path opened up, though the walls, floor, and low ceiling were still black. Light had to be coming from somewhere but the source wasn't immediately obvious, it just seemed to glow from the bright splashes and stripes of color on the walls.

Sheppard followed a turn, one hand on the wall just to keep himself oriented in the dark, and somehow found himself nose to another wall. That was annoying. He had to turn around and go back, watching close for a missed fork in the trail.

Adjusting his eyesight was beginning to get old. But John kept at it. He tried listening for Rodney, absolutely certain that he should have run into a wall and been cursing by now. All Sheppard could hear was the sound of a forced-air AC and some kind of static with various tonal beeps under it. If he listened too close, it could probably drive him up the very weird walls, so John kept his hearing down.

A few turns and dead ends later and Sheppard came to a false wall that was nothing more than a blackout curtain. Make that two black out curtains... no... four layers of blackout curtains later and John found himself in a white hallway, bright white and blue, in high, painful contrast to the dark trails he had just escaped.

Sporadically placed mirrors glowed blindingly every few feet, and John stopped short at a section of the floor that looked like a long length of mirror itself. If he thought the darkness was annoying, he was wrong. John hadn't grabbed his sunglasses when he’d left his room, just himself and the wrist brace, and he was regretting it.

As he took more turns, he found more mirrors, and the mirrors were shaped and cut at angles while still seeming flat. Funhouse convex mirrors, updated to the modern age, with built-in LEDs. The light refracted and bounced off each panel, somehow spreading tiny blue rainbows at random sections of plain, mirrorless walls.

John felt his eyes watering at the tiny pinpricks of pain triggered by the brightness, and he ran into more walls. Which was all the more irritating when he walked into a wall that was a mirror and his distorted face stared back at him only _after_ he had run into it.

He noticed little camera pods in the corners of the ceilings, much more obvious in the bright room. That was annoying and John wiped his face on a shoulder before flipping the bird at the nearest camera. The cameras made sense, though. It was supposed to be a controlled environment, nobody was supposed to die in training.

But John was reminded of all those active-training weeks he had spent at the beginning of his Air Force career, in the middle of nowhere, in the heat and the sun, with the live rounds, and training wasn't safe. Helicopters crashed in training. Accidents happened. He had approached this task the wrong way entirely.

That was on Sheppard, his fault.

Their fault for the hellacious training, but John's fault for underestimating it.

The maze didn't get any easier after that, John just became more aware of his own anxiety about it. He could get lost in there for hours easily, it wasn't a milk run. He started listening for Rodney again, consciously letting his hearing stretch out. So far everything had been visual, no strange surprise sounds, so he could gamble. There was something faint that might have been a heartbeat, but it was elevated, so he didn't know if it was just his own echoed back to him from the walls.

When he finally made it through enough dead ends to hit the next section, he had been in there perhaps a half an hour. And his nose was bruised from walking into a wall, so that happened. Sheppard was irritated.

The fact that the next section was wider, taller, and alternating stripes was a relief. The ceiling, however, was dotted with various sizes of disco ball Death Stars that reflected every bit of light and a few different colors of shiny, pokey laser beams that either caught his eyes directly or reflected off the random panels of mirrors to stab him.

If there was a trick to getting out of the maze without wanting to deck somebody, John hadn't figured it out yet. But then something near the floor further down the hall caught his attention, a little red dot that wasn't coming from the disco death stars, but was rather generating it itself. A motion sensor, placed very close to another. And not aimed across the walkway. It would take some effort to trip. John approached carefully.

When the sensor registered his presence, there were a few clicks, and a few other red lights switched to green along the floor sensors up the hall. And then suddenly everything was pitch black. Not even any day-glo on the walls. Blacker than black. All John could see was the slight glow of his watch face that told him he had been in the maze well over forty minutes. His head was throbbing and his eyes were sore.

He waited, relieved, in the darkness. The only lights that were still visible were the motion sensor lights. And the tiny dots that marked the camera baubles in the ceiling. When the swirling lights didn't come back on, John took a few educated guesses and followed the sensor lights and his ears, based on the sound of his footfalls in the quiet, on where there would be a turn. The path was wider and he couldn't just drag his arms along the walls anymore. And he could definitely hear McKay.

"Look, I really should have had food before we did this little exercise," his friend's voice said, not far away.

"Rodney!" John announced, his voice loud and he hoped projecting. It was time to cheat before John went insane. "Keep talking."

There was a quiet before Rodney's voice could be heard again. "John? Where are you? Can you hurry up? I'm stuck in a box. There are _literally_ no doors. And I'm starving."

Sheppard followed the voice, actually glad for the darkness. It was rest. But he was still stressed, because of course Rodney was going to be whining about food. _Of course_.

"Just... keep complaining," John ordered. And he listened to McKay go on and on about his absolute confusion with the entire day and why wasn't he helping with the gene research already and next time they had any training at all he was bringing MREs. And it allowed Sheppard to get to what he assumed was the last wall, because he could feel McKay's words reverberate through the thinner wall under his fingertips.

"McKay! Can you see?" he asked through the wall. He pounded on the wall to try to give Rodney an idea of where he was. "I'm right here... are you close?"

There was a scratching noise, like a chair or table being dragged, and then footsteps. John was close enough he could hear Rodney breathe. Yes. That was good. He tapped on the wall again. The sound was met with an answering tap.

"I can't see shit, Rodney. Is there a door on this wall?" Sheppard asked. "Look for seams. Something. Otherwise, if this is a massive dead end, I'm just going to go through it the hard way, I swear."

He didn't have an ax, but so help him, he had boots.

"Why can't you see? It's bright as day in here," said Rodney. He sounded worried now, so John figured the complaining tone was going to shift.

"It's pitch black on this side," he replied. "There's nothing here."

He listened as Rodney set about dragging his hands along the walls, sometimes tapping or knocking, sometimes kicking. Finally, after about ten feet, John heard Rodney's stress-level drop.

"Here! Check here!" And McKay started tapping around a section of wall. Sheppard followed the sound and started pressing at the wall just as he had the door from the closet that had started the maze. And just as before, the narrow door pressed open easily and swung in against a surprised Rodney.

It was bright in the room and Sheppard's head ached, but he reached out and caught McKay by the shoulder, smiling at the successful teamwork. Rodney's relief faded.

"Are you okay?"

"'mfine. Just... not going back that way," John said as he stepped into the bright, white-walled room and closed the door. Rodney scrambled to reach for it.

"Nonono!"

As John shut one door, another door across the room made a very loud - to John, anyway- unlocking sound and _snicked_ open. They both looked over at it.

"Are you kidding me! I've been trying that for a _half an hour_!" Rodney complained. John caught Rodney around the shoulders and leaned in to as much of a hug as he would ask for while they were working.

"It took you less time to fight a door than it took me to find it, so... lead the way, Magellan," John said, squinting against the lights as he tugged Rodney toward the new exit. Rodney caught him around the ribs and led the way out.

*~*~


	27. Chapter 27

It was ultimately decided that the antibiotics were going to need a chance to run their course. Stiles' senses were not at all stable enough to do much more than get him started on theory - whatever that meant - and it would probably take a few days for everything to really hit. Somehow, the over-bright everything, the smell headaches, and the loud planes were only just the start, and according to Blair there was always the possibility that the other senses wouldn't be impacted. Stiles would be fine with that because he wasn’t sure how to handle it if everything lit up on him at once.

So Stiles and Derek got a tour of the five buildings on the compound, along with nearly everyone else except Rodney and Sheppard, and then... left in a big break room with a teapot full of herbal tea that Stiles was under orders to drink. Derek just tucked back into reading the stupid book and left Stiles to stay out of trouble at the table with his tea. And it wasn't like Stiles didn't appreciate the effort, but he hadn't had coffee in a while, and the red, mildly fruity mystery tea wasn't the same thing at all.

"I mean, what's the odds I'm actually fine and it's just something in that IV or the tea that's making everything go crazy?" Stiles asked Derek, quiet. It wasn't quiet enough, as Teyla heard him. She had been investigating a stack of magazines on one of the tables like she had never seen the bright, flimsy, paper booklet mailers before, and abandoned the curiosity to investigate Stiles' claim.

"I promise, they aren't drugging you," Derek was saying. "Your smell is going back to _normal_."

Teyla picked up the tea pot that Blair had mixed up for him, smelled at the tea brewing inside. Then she helped herself to a paper mug and poured some tea.

"I don't believe Carson would allow you to be given something unhealthy, and I happen to like tea, myself. So let us share and find out," she suggested. She didn't seem offended, though her smile was faded by a very serious sobriety.

Stiles backed off the idea that he was being drugged again after that. Teyla didn’t mind the tea, and told him about a blend she had once found that tasted similar and the locals used to reduce infection. She danced around exactly where she had found it, and it was clear that she wasn’t from San Francisco like she had first reported that first day at the hospital.

Contemplating the tea on the table in front of him, Stiles took the headphones off and started trying to get used to everything being loud again. The constant sound input at max volume played hell with his attention span and his mind spun off in a few different directions, leaving him looking suspiciously out the big floor to ceiling windows along one wall of the break room. They looked out on trees and the climb of the ridge behind the campus, but Stiles’ imagination kept telling him there were Alphas behind the birch and mangroves. He ignored it and tried to focus on the sounds around him.

He tuned in first to Derek’s breathing, and the sound of the page turning at the table next to him. Derek was perfectly fine ignoring everyone, his brow furrowed as he worked through the massive textbook on Sentinel. Stiles wondered if he concentrated hard enough, could he hear Derek’s thoughts?

Some level of thought knew it was dumb, but he tried anyway. The best he got was a heartbeat echoing. And then another one could be heard, and another, and Stiles tried desperately to find something else to listen to. The building was too quiet by design, so there was nothing. Stiles drummed out a beat on the tabletop just to get away from it.

But then he tried again because it didn’t bother him as much as he got used to it. He looked over at Teyla again.

“If Ronon’s from Atlantis, where are you from?” he asked. Teyla hesitated, shooting a glare over at where Ronon stood against the window. The man smirked, arms crossed as he looked back at them. He shrugged.

“I’m not from Atlantis,” he clarified, far too casual about it. But there were two extra heartbeats that Stiles was paying attention to. One was steady and one had sped up when Stiles asked the question. Stiles looked to Teyla and saw on her face that she was working it over. Finally, she smiled, not her usual warm and welcoming, but something almost sneaky.

“San Francisco,” she said. “Until Colonel Sheppard says otherwise.”

Her heartbeat settled a little, but she still seemed anxious. Stiles took a drink of tea, contemplating what to do with this new party trick. His eyes cut over to Derek.

“Hey,” he said, kicking his friend lightly under the table to get his attention. Derek didn’t look up, just tapped the book against the table edge briefly.

“ _I_ know what you’re doing, Stiles,” he replied. “Fuck off.”

Stiles grumbled into his drink but didn’t push it. Teyla broke into a laughing smile and seemed to relax again.

*~*~*

Sheppard didn't really open his eyes much on the way out of the maze. He walked himself just fine, hung onto Rodney mostly just to touch and make sure he didn't walk into any walls, so he was probably fine. But he kept his head down, and his expression said there was pain. A lot of it. So McKay led the way back out of the maze, which looked a lot like the mini-mockup from the other room, with the white bare walls and overhead buzz of fluorescent lighting. He only hit one dead end and then remembered the path again and they were soon out, back into the softer lighting of the entry hall.

"What the hell was that?" Rodney asked when he saw Ellison again. The man sighed and checked his watch.

"Volume, McKay," Sheppard requested. He was back in his own space and rubbing his eyes. Rodney muttered an apology but still glared at Ellison.

"I told you it was gonna suck," Ellison reminded him. "Believe me next time, huh?"

Rodney crossed his arms, annoyed because he couldn't exactly argue the point. Ellison nodded his acceptance of the win and waved a hand between them.

"But listen, you guys just finished that in a little under an hour," he said. "Usually, when we send a team in there, it takes nearly three hours. And maybe three out of ten will figure out how to do more than yell at each other through the wall. In two minutes, you found the door. You did good."

Rodney relaxed a little at that. He looked from the trainer to John. That was good news, anyway. He personally would count that as a win. Sheppard was still squinting as his eyes adjusted to the room, but he smiled, backhanded Rodney's arm.

"Hey, see, we did okay," he said.

"Excepting the fact that you're now _blind_ , yes," replied Rodney. Sheppard shrugged his shoulders like he didn't care.

"It'll come back," he said.

"Sunglasses will help," Ellison suggested. "But yeah. That's part of the idea here. It took the Colonel forty minutes to clear fifty yards from door to door. That was _just_ messing with his vision. And it's probably going to take him another hour to recover."

Sheppard set hands on his hips and blinked at the news like he believed it. "Okay then."

Rodney spluttered. "We already knew we could take them down with their senses. _Especially_ their vision. So, what, we're in _How to torture your Sentinel 101_ now?"

"This wasn't torture," John said, but he was skating by on a thin definition. "It was training."

Rodney looked over at him. "You can't see me right now, but this is me, glaring, at your stupidity for that statement."

"Rodney," replied John, just letting the calm threat hang there.

Ellison looked between them before meeting Rodney's glare. "You done?"

"Probably not, but carry on," said Rodney.

Ellison accepted the honest answer with a nod. "Good. Now, the only one who was in there was him. That particular test isn't for anyone other than us. Meaning me, or him, or any other Sentinel we send through. He's going to remember that, and he had to adapt while he was in there. And any time he runs into a mess like that, he's got something to fall back on. It worked here."

"And," Sheppard added, "It did a good job reminding me I am but a mere mortal and can still be taken out by freaking laser beams, so I need to pay freaking attention to my surroundings."

Rodney maintained his glare. Ellison shook his head.

"Just wait until _you_ walk him through the sniff-test. Same thing, different sense," Jim replied.

John looked momentarily worried before pasting on a smile again. "Oh good. I _love_ smelling things."

Rodney sighed and gave up. "I'm hungry. Can we go?"

John latched onto his elbow again. Not entirely blind, but not entirely trusting his vision either, based on the way he stepped behind Rodney to keep from the threat of walls and other obstacles.

By the time they made it to the break room on the first floor, John had managed to break off on his own again. He walked into the break room, saw the bright daylight from the windows, and looped back out of the room.

" _Nope_. Sunglasses first," he apparently decided. Rodney started to go with him but John stopped with a hand to the shoulder to steer him back inside. "Go get lunch."

Not one to argue about food, McKay let him leave, but only because Ellison went with him. So Rodney went to investigate the break room. He was surprised to see Teyla and Ronon and their teenaged charges in there, too.

"I thought you guys were going to the labs?" he asked as he began searching the kitchenette area for food. A lot of prepackaged stuff that he wasn't sure he could trust. On to the _refrigerator_.

"Blair took Carson, Colonel Carter, and Dr. Jackson back to the lab to meet the researchers. He said he'd be right back..." offered Stiles. He didn't have the headphones on this time.

Rodney harrumphed at the pre-packaged ham and turkey sandwich he found in one of the refrigerator coolers. No prices were listed, so who knew how old it was, but maybe it was still edible inside the sealed packaging. Just in case it was, he grabbed two. Then he went to sit at the table with Teyla.

He pointed at the headphones sitting on the table. "What's with those?"

"White noise cancels out some sounds," said Derek, speaking over the rambled version that Stiles was working on. Rodney looked to the younger of the teens.

"White noise- so, what, you were listening to static?"

Stiles nodded. "Dr. Jackson's idea. And it worked."

Rodney sat back in his chair to break into his sandwich. "Of course it did." But he didn't dwell on the annoying jealousy and put Daniel on ignore. He saw that Derek was reading the Sentinel book rather than Stiles, and given that he had yet to see John Sheppard pick up the same book, Rodney started to wonder if the unofficial test of a Guide was to see who had the capacity to binge-read a textbook first. Rather than disturb the focus of the werewolf, Rodney looked to Stiles.

"How are you doing with the senses stuff here?" he asked. "Sheppard said the buildings are Sentinel-proofed to help."

"I can hear stuff, and it's bright in here. Blair said it's gonna take a while before everything is online," the kid said.

"Hey, if it means you get out of this crazy training stuff, enjoy it," Rodney replied, crunching on his sandwich.

"Sandburg said I can spar with Sheppard again tomorrow for training," Ronon said from the window. "And Teyla and I can thrash him on Friday."

He apparently thought training was great. The big man was smiling, quite happy to be getting to finally do what they had spent a whole month traveling in order to do. Rodney still nearly choked on his sandwich.

"Not today you can't," he replied. "Nuh uh. No."

" _Tomorrow_ ," said Ronon. "And there's a shooting range. That's tomorrow, too."

Rodney wasn't bothered so much by the shooting range, but the _thrashing_ promise was daunting. "Do I get a say in this?"

Ronon shrugged. "Nope. Sandburg and Ellison said he can do it."

"I don't like this idea," said Rodney. Across the table, Stiles smacked at Derek's elbow next to him.

"See, I told you. Normal people don't _default_ to kicking other people's asses for _fun_ ," said the teen. 

Ronon snorted out a laugh. "There's your mistake," he replied. "McKay’s not normal."

"Oh, ha ha, laugh it up," replied Rodney, rolling his eyes. "Just don't be surprised if I kill your fun. John can hardly see right now. He shouldn't be fighting anybody."

"You're not a trainer," said Ronon. He came over to stand behind Teyla, arms crossed, but he looked more curious than mad. Rodney squared up, elbows on the table over his sandwich.

"No, just his Guide. And I'm pretty sure that counts for something. Not sure what exactly, but something," he said. "And long story short, I don't think anybody should be hitting him with sticks yet."

"Huh," said Ronon. He shrugged. The man could _whatever_ his way around things better than anybody. Teyla was back to doing the thing where she stared at Rodney like she could read his mind.

"What?" he asked. "John said everyone else was already in on it."

"Well, we guessed," said Teyla. "We didn't _know_."

_Oops_. Rodney shrugged. Now they knew.

"The Guide says _No_ beating John with sticks," he reiterated.

"What's a Guide?" Stiles asked.

"The guy who gets to boss around the Sentinel," said Derek. Rodney nodded. He pointed to the werewolf. He liked that definition.

"That works," said Rodney. "What he said."

"I don't think that's quite accurate," said Teyla, amused and smiling again.

Rodney shrugged. " _I_ like it."

"You don't get to boss around the Lieutenant Colonel," Teyla replied.

"I don't want a boss," said Stiles. "Don't need one. I'll figure it out."

"Ehhh, wrong answer, kid," came John's voice from the doorway.

_Oops_. Rodney hunkered down a little over the remnants of his sandwich. John seemed to be doing better now that he had his glasses back as a shield. He walked up behind Rodney and stole the last half of the sandwich that Rodney hadn't gotten to yet.

" _Hey_!"

"You're not the boss of me," John informed him.

" _Okay_ , but I'm still _hungry_ ," Rodney complained, quieter about it. John smirked at him and gave the sandwich back, minus a bite. Rodney frowned up over his shoulder at him but he honestly wasn't that offended, given he was _definitely_ going to boss John for it later. John set his hands on the back of Rodney’s chair and leaned comfortably against it as he returned his attention to the baby-Sentinel in the room.

"Stiles, I'm not the expert here, but I'll tell you what I've figured out. First off, the experts are sneaky. They don't just give you the answers, they make you find 'em first. And it sucks," John said, still hiding behind his sunglasses. Rodney looked over and saw Jim Ellison standing not far away, arms crossed as John freely called out his training team.

"Second, the Guide thing?" Sheppard continued. "Trust me. You want one. And to save everyone a lot of time and a trip to the woods, I'm going to _gently suggest_ you consider it might be him." He nodded toward Derek. "Since he's sitting there reading the book _for_ you, and you come out _swinging_ any time someone looks at him twice."

“No, I don’t...”

“Carson,” offered Teyla. “While he was trying to help you in the helicopter?”

“Me,” added John. “Again, when I was trying to _help_...”

“Whatever. He’s not my boss,” said Stiles, crossing his arms over the tabletop. Rodney looked to Derek, who was scanning the faces in the room and very carefully neutral. He casually returned his attention to the book in his hands and went back a few sections to one Rodney noted had been dog-eared nearly half the page. Derek smoothed the page out and then set it back on the table to slide over under Stiles’ nose so he could read the section.

Stiles seemed to scan the page and his very colorful, bruised face turned slightly pink as he blushed. He shoved the book carefully back toward Derek. “Yeah, whatever. Shut up.”

Rodney sat up a little taller and tried to read upside down; if there was a more complete section on Guides in that book, Rodney realized he needed to get back to reading.

“Uh huh, thought so,” said Sheppard. He looked over at Ellison. “I meant to ask, is there, like, a sniff-test on the Guide thing? Is that why you were so worked up about Rodney and me?”

Jim nodded. “Something like it. It’s just hard to tell if they share that imprint because of close quarters or other stuff. Pheromones have a scent, but it’s different for everyone.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Rodney asked, thoroughly offended at the implication that he was sitting there stinking up the place. John leaned forward to speak quieter next to his ear.

“It means you smell like me. Sorry,” he offered up. He didn’t sound that sorry. Rodney blinked at the news.

“Well, that’s not awkward at all,” muttered Rodney. John, because he was a jerk, stood up again just so he could put both hands on Rodney’s face and head and add more John-smell to Rodney’s messed up hair.

“Come on. Eat. Labs,” John said, bossing him on purpose. Rodney took his time to fix his hair before going back to eating.

*~*~*

The brief tour from Ellison was mostly just to cover what sat between the main campus and the smaller building that housed the lab. The Sentinel Project did a lot of their own science-stuff, so it had a single story building tucked in the middle of the larger main buildings and the dorms. All of the buildings looked the same, up to a new-building code that the Project had gone to battle with years ago and lost. There would be no expansion projects on the campus, so the program’s numbers were dwindling in recent years, accommodating soldiers with a waiting list that the SGC had just barely managed to jump the line on.

The month wait between first sign up and the recent admissions certainly helped. Ellison let slip that Sandburg had tucked Stilinski’s admission in under John’s team in order to get the kid a spot so quick, and that could potentially blow back on them, but they were gambling that they would be out of the Project administrators’ reach before anybody bothered to notice.

“Guess if you’re gonna twist my arm like that, I’ll think about getting them on the payroll somehow,” said John as they walked into the lobby of the lab building.

“Stiles isn’t old enough,” Rodney pointed out. John shrugged.

“So we figure something out,” he replied. "Yeah, he's a kid, but I'm not gonna argue with the ATA."

Jim shook his head and stopped in the middle of the room, looking between three different hallways.

“I have no idea where Sandburg took them for this,” he admitted, and it was clear he was listening. Sandburg wasn’t exactly quiet that John had noticed, except when he was stuck on the job around doctors who treated him like one of their own, and it wasn’t likely they were dealing with that as the case if they were looking for him among, as Ellison called them, the eggheads. Rodney was never quiet when he was yelling at other scientists, so maybe Blair wouldn’t be so hard to track down.

“ _We screwed up big with this. This whole thing..._ ” John heard familiar voices and started toward the direction he thought they were coming from, but something made him stop and listen instead. He recognized Sam Carter’s voice first.

“ _The Sentinel Project isn’t anybody’s_ fault _-_ ” And suddenly John was blatantly snooping on a whispered conversation because the Sentinel Project was name dropped. Ellison started toward the hall but John put out a hand to block him.

“ _Look, Sam, I’m just saying, I think we’re responsible,_ ” came Daniel Jackson’s voice, very quiet, up around the corner down one of the hallways. “ _This. All of this. It shouldn’t have happened like this. I know it didn’t in that timeline._ ”

“ _I understand why you feel that way, Daniel, but there is quite definitely nothing we can do about it. We tried. This... is just the outcome. We’re stuck with it._ ”

“ _No,_ they’re _stuck with it,_ ” said Daniel.

“ _Jack’s trying to fix it. He’s pushing for calling it time served, and then Blair can just get a standard civilian contract and a real paycheck and they can keep doing what they’re doing,_ ” said Sam. “ _I think... I think Jack’s got it figured the same as you. He’s been working on it non-stop. But we can’t do anything else. We already know how this stuff goes. It ends up like this._ ”

“ _Yeah, or we get rid of the gene,_ ” Daniel replied. “ _There’s gotta be-_ ”

“ _Okay, guys! Sorry, I had to talk to Dr. Gallow about a... hey... woah, everything okay_?” Blair Sandburg’s voice just stumbled into the wrong conversation at the absolute worst time. So had John Sheppard, and now he didn’t know what to do with it. He looked to Ellison, knowing there was no way the man hadn’t heard it, too. He just didn’t have the same context. What context John had was incomplete, but he wasn’t an idiot about timelines within Stargate Command, either.

“What?” Rodney asked him. Further down the hall, Carson’s voice joined the conversation with Blair and the two members of the SGC. John shook his head. He pointed toward the hallway.

“Later. They’re down there,” he said, pointing them toward the right hall. He had his sunglasses to hide behind and could ride that excuse a long while until his attitude readjusted. Rodney didn't give him crap for showing off again and just headed for the hall, intent to catch up to whatever he had obviously just missed.

Ellison hung back, looking at Sheppard warily. "Do I want to ask?"

Sheppard had to think about it seriously, trying to unravel if _he_ even wanted to ask. The Sentinel Project's existence had been a thorn in his side for a month, and it was quite literally a pain for him even now. But Ellison himself had said the program helped people, and in just a few days it had certainly helped John more than a month of trying to figure it out on his own. But playing with timelines to bring it about... that part rubbed him wrong. Sheppard didn’t have enough information to know what to do with it, so he tried to put it away in a box for later.

“Not now,” he said. He tapped Ellison’s shoulder and nodded toward the hall. Then he jogged to catch up with Rodney, making sure to make plenty of noise on the wood floor.

Rodney’s arrival more or less started the tour of the building over again, and for half of it, Carson added in bits and pieces of what he had already been granted access to in order to help the Sentinel Project’s geneticists get into the ProX. The doctors would certainly be hitting the ground running. Blair Sandburg hung back with Ellison and Sheppard for most of it, slack-jawed listening to Beckett and McKay go back and forth like they were talking another language based solely on their experience with cracking the ATA.

Sheppard kept tabs on Sam and Daniel, too. Not like he was spying or anything. Just... internally debating on whether he wanted to ask about diverted timelines. The curiosity of it hit pretty hard up against the urge to ask ‘what if’ and that’s where it always fell apart. But the thing about the SGC was they kept notes. Sheppard eventually settled on the issue by resolving to access their mission reports when they were back in Colorado. He would only have to ask about the mission then. Not admit how he knew to ask about it.

John felt better about it after that and had no problem settling a chair back against the wall and closing his eyes to just listen to Rodney and Carson and Sam sometimes argue about the more predictable rules and laws of science and physiology and the realm of possibility.

*~*~*


	28. Chapter 28

After Sheppard left, Stiles stole the book back from Derek. He read the entire chapter that Derek had shown him the section of. He was looking for some technical glitch that would declare Derek ineligible as Guide because Stiles wanted to kiss him.

Instead, it said the opposite: Sentinel are extremely tactile people - _Check_. - who get very protective of people they see as theirs - ... _also check_. - and most especially protective and tactile with those they rely on, because of their territorial tendencies. _Oh_.

So because Sentinel were possessive assholes ( _Check_.) the Guide got manhandled a lot in the course of a Sentinel being protective of them, and it normally carried over even when the Guide wasn't in any danger. Stiles personally felt he was behind on that particular bullet point.

Incidentally, it implied that Guides were trouble magnets and if that alone didn't scream Derek Hale, nothing did. Stiles didn't have a highlighter otherwise he would have been circling things in the book, and that was one of them.

According to the book, there was nothing inherently romantic about the relationships between Sentinel and Guide; a genetic flip of a switch couldn't improve their game. That was up to the discretion of the Sentinel and Guide, and they had never been able to prove what it was that made a Sentinel imprint so strongly on a single person. It wasn't a perfect system at all, but it was perfectly clear that the touchy-feely, tactile Sentinel was going to touch whoever they dragged into the program. A lot. And in ways virtually indistinguishable from those between people who were in an adult, consensual romantic relationship with them.

Well, it wasn't exactly _permission_ to molest Derek in public, but the book promised it was statistically likely to happen.

It also outlined that Derek wasn't his boss. He was just the one who didn't have senses that made him crazy, so theoretically normal society could better identify and communicate with the Guide. That was a spectacular fail on Stiles' part, considering the number of people who would prefer to kill Derek on sight over engaging in any communication. Stiles' whole Sentinel thing was thinking with the wrong brain.

It was Stiles' own fault for choosing to latch onto a werewolf outcast as some kind of Guide because Derek had failed pretty spectacularly at being an alpha, and he was only barely an adult, so his judgement was suspect. Nobody else knew that, though, and Stiles wasn't going to go around blabbing about it. He was just going to have to get used to Derek being a more insufferable know it all than he already was, since Derek had been reading the massive book and Stiles just really didn't want to.

There was nothing at all saying Derek had to help him, anyway. The book outlined the Sentinel's reliance on the Guide like some kind of addiction, that could either be severed completely until the Sentinel figured out how to ground themselves, which was a months long process with statistically low stable outcomes, or the Guide could step up and tolerate the privacy invasions of their Sentinel. It was their call.

The book outlined some things they didn't have figured out entirely yet about the Sentinel impact on the Guide. The pheromones thing Ellison had mentioned wasn't as easily measured because human physiology was still fuzzy on the cause and effect of all the different types of human hormones at play in the body.

They could look at a Sentinel's DNA and discover the active ProX gene, but they could only look at the changed behavior of a Guide. No one chemical change had been as clearly found. But over time, anecdotal similarities would present themselves between a Sentinel and Guide team that didn't exist between roommates, partners, or even spouses. The Guide impact had no scientific explanation, only soft science evidence to support the conclusion that Guides could go just as crazy as the Sentinel when their partner was threatened.

The dependency angle for the Sentinel sucked, but the only intervention solutions offered were chemical reprogramming with professionally monitored drugs and isolation. Kinda what the Alphas had done to Stiles, but he still came back out of it dogging Derek.

So, in his own, personal conclusion, Stiles had attached himself to a Guide. And it happened to be to the guy he'd been crushing on for months. It meant that now he was stuck with Derek as long as Derek was okay with it. Who knew if werewolves were subject to whatever magic whomped the Guide into latching on to their Sentinel.

But Derek was the one who had bookmarked the page about touchy Sentinels and Guides who encouraged it. And the fact that Stiles hadn't left Derek's side in a week wasn't just a one-way thing; Derek hadn't left Stiles alone in a week either. Not even to sleep. It wasn't just Stiles who had come to that conclusion.

Stiles read all of twenty pages about the Guides before he was done. He closed the book and dropped it back on the table in front of Derek. They had so much other shit they needed to worry about. Some 500 pages of textbook shouldn't be on their radar. They should be in Beacon Hills, scrounging through the woods, trying to figure out if it was safe to go home to the loft yet. And instead they were over a hundred miles away, hiding somewhere no one would know to look for them, waiting for Stiles' weird headaches to stop. Headaches that had nothing to do with being drugged into oblivion for two weeks.

Derek looked over at him, a bushy eyebrow raised in judgement. "Well?"

"Shut up. I already asked you to stay. This just gives you an excuse," Stiles replied. There was no heat to it, only his usual attitude, and Derek smiled. The really pretty, real one.

"Yeah, I guess it does. I already told you I would though. No excuses needed," he replied. Stiles looked over at him, eyes darting up from where he had been staring at the book. He knew he was blushing because he felt flustered. He was glad Ronon and Teyla had gone to explore outside because the empty break room was safer.

"Had you read this stuff yet, when you said that?" he asked. Derek shook his head, and Stiles tried to run with the human lie-detector trick he had learned from the werewolves months ago; a steady heartbeat wasn't lying.

"Not then," Derek replied. Stiles accepted it with a nod, trying to shrug it off when his insides had just started up a conga line in celebration. His own heart was racing and that was suddenly an embarrassment, knowing now how loud that could be to someone like Derek or Sheppard.

Stiles took a deep breath and tried to calm down. Next to him, the asshole he had apparently way too much of a crush on just grinned at him. It wasn't until he smiled back and the attention didn't fade that Stiles felt himself calm down.

"Finish your stupid tea already," Derek finally said, reclaiming the book so he could go back to reading. Stiles mocked him for it, but he reached out to pick up his now cold paper mug.

"You're not my boss," he said.

"Nope. Just the guy who's gonna kick your ass if you don't hurry up and get back to normal," said Derek casually. Stiles smirked at the empty threat.

"Right... forgot that part."

*~*~*

They eventually escaped the genetics lab, but not before Sheppard had passed out in the corner. He didn't feel at all bad about it, either. He just crossed his arms and slouched back against the wall and hid behind his sunglasses, so no one noticed. Except probably Ellison, but if he did, he didn't mention it. One minute John was fading off and the next he was waking up to a sharp, echoing whistle that bounced off the walls of the lab and Sheppard's brain.

"Sheppard! Let's go!" Ellison said from the door, much louder than he needed to be. John dropped his chair back to four feet, rubbing at his poor abused ears, and stood to follow them out.

"I wanna try that white noise headset thing Stiles was using," Sheppard said.

"Don't be a baby," replied Ellison. "Or, better yet, pay attention to your surroundings so you don't get surprised. Remember that one? You were _just_ telling us about it..."

"Yeah, yeah," dismissed Sheppard, not at all offended by the taunt. He had definitely been caught napping.

"Is hyper-vigilance really helpful with the sensory load?" Daniel asked Blair as the group hit the hallway again. He had apparently missed the punchline and John smiled broadly as Blair started in on Jim about trying to break the new guys.

"You aren't allowed to work with Stiles. The guy has had enough shit, don't go adding paranoia," said Blair. John and Rodney both nodded their agreement, but Sheppard wasn't going to just leave such a wide open shot unanswered when his trainer started playing favorites.

"Well, it's not like I need the push either," offered Sheppard. "I just got here, too, you know."

"Maybe, but you're pretty good about getting into trouble. It wouldn't hurt you to get back in the game a little more," said Blair. "You've had almost a month off at this point. Jim's right, you're probably pretty rusty."

Well, that was one sparring match that had backfired. John squared his shoulders and shrugged. "Hey, it's not my fault. _Carson_ grounded me..."

"Aye, and you get let back out in the world for _two days_ and ye have a broken wrist behind my back. I don't see how ye reckon you woulda made it a _month_ without restrictions to get this far in the first place," replied the accused Dr. Beckett. That was probably a valid point.

"From what Caldwell said, you would have figured out how to crash the Daedalus if you hadn't been confined to quarters," added Daniel. The argument had taken them to the door and John dodged ahead to hold it open for the group.

" _About_ that... I'm gonna need the brain trust here to figure out how to get me off quarantine on the ship," he said. "Get Sandburg looped in on the Ancient tech this week so we can stop the ship from hacking into... _my business_..."

"Wait, what?" Daniel asked, even as Sam echoed with an "Excuse me?"

The group now stood outside, which was less than ideal, but John nodded. He waved a hand around the gathered group. "I'm all for reigning in the senses, but I can't control the tech. That's kind of... your collective area."

"To clarify, _John_ wasn't messing with the ship, nor could he have crashed it. The Daedalus was _hacking_ into the ProX whenever John got too close to the Ops systems," said Rodney. "Carson and I got a few odd readings off it."

"It was the damnedest thing," added Carson. "Sent his whole system into a bit of chaos for an hour after Colonel Caldwell let him use the command chair. Blood-work and everything was off. Not a trace of nanites. Nothing residual left behind. But very... odd."

"Define _odd_ ," said Daniel.

"I'm sorry, we're back on the _science_ -sciences now," said Rodney, ever so helpful. "Linguistics and anthropology are in another building. Keep up."

Daniel tossed off an unamused glare and John caught hold of Rodney's wrist to silently remind him not to hassle Sam's team. Rodney sighed but John didn't let him have his arm back as apparently the geek would need his own babysitter.

"Odd, as defined by oddly healthy. Younger blood cells, essentially. And the computer interface went literally anywhere his mind wandered off to, and the sensor array followed," said McKay, the sarcasm significantly dropped. "He got us a deck-by-deck layout and life support map of a Wraith cruiser when we should have been almost entirely out of sensor range."

"Wraith?" Blair asked. The man was wide-eyed and tracking the conversation well, but he had no possible way of putting anything together without the context. John looked to Sam.

"They need brought in, Colonel. If there's gonna be ProX ATA on that ship again, we need answers. We can't just be confined to quarters for another month going back," said Sheppard.

"And I'm more than a little concerned about Atlantis, too," added Carson. "The city... seemed to have it's own impact."

"We're just finding out about this _now_?" Carter asked, at least a little shocked by what she was hearing.

"How are we supposed to write up a report about it if we can't explain it?" John replied. "I was on medical leave, can't make a report. And my team was just along as passengers. Caldwell asked me to use the chair, so maybe _he_ made a report, but there was nothing to report aside from a power surge and detailed readings..."

"Power surge?!" Carter and Jackson both latched on to the same poorly chosen word. This was exactly why John Sheppard would never get to drop the _Lieutenant_ from in front of the rank, he just knew it.

" _Hello_... I am missing, like, a lot of _everything_ here..." said Sandburg.

"It's something to do with the ProX. Young Stilinski could make the tracker do some impressive things. He didn't know what he was doing, not at all, and the tracker just accommodated what he asked for..." Carson went on. "And Colonel Sheppard's symptoms were far more drastic once he hit Atlantis, but he'd been showing them on the planet without the trouble..."

"Everything was a lot more intense on the ship and back at home," said John soberly. "There's something going on there. And I'm gonna need some ideas on how to shield this stuff."

"I'm wondering if you _should_ even go back," Sam admitted, quiet and looking very worried. John shook his head, let go of Rodney just to raise his hand to show the tattoo.

"Colonel, I didn't go through all _this_ just to get stuck _here_. I'm going home," said John. "Don't write me off."

There was absolutely no risk of a fight brewing just then, John was energized after a nap but hadn't lost his senses enough to get in Colonel Carter's face. She was on his side on the whole thing, so there would be no problems. But Sandburg was a natural peacekeeper and entered the fray even though he didn't know anything about what they were arguing over.

"Say there _is_ an interaction between this Ancient tech and the ProX," Blair said. He was shooting from the hip off of what he could piece together, and looked from face to face to be sure he was making some kind of sense as he talked. "They just said it was an entirely positive response. Everything worked _better_ , not worse. So if we're really talking an ancient, advanced civilization, then the ProX might have been their _standard_. Not their outlier."

John nodded and looked to Sam and Daniel. " _Exactly_. We just haven't run into it before, we could never tap into it because the replicated ATA doesn't have the ProX, and mine wasn't active. Now we _can_."

"Theoretically, we need _more_ ProX holders up there," said Daniel. " _If_ that's the case."

John waved his hand to vaguely indicate his general surroundings. "I got us two, and there's at least one more we could probably talk into it, if we can get around the age requirements," he said. He waffled a bit on it once the words were out. "And the werewolf plus-one. Still gotta sound that one out a little more."

"The trick is to keep them _in control_ of their senses when they're surrounded by the tech," said Carson. Blair started shaking his head and he shrugged, his hands waving on the way down.

"Man, I dunno. We could _try_. But we're gonna need more than a week..."

"Okay. _Two_ , but we got no more than that," said John quickly. Caldwell was probably going to kill him for hijacking his command, but thankfully John only had to negotiate with Sam Carter.

"Stiles might not even be fully online by then," said Blair. "The kid was... like... you don't even know yet the trip he was on for two weeks. That's gonna take him a _minute_ to get past it..."

"You and Ellison are going with us, so you'll be able to help," replied Sheppard. "And that's still a big _if_ on if he even wants to go. We can focus on the two Sentinel we _do_ have committed to the trip and sort out the kid along the way."

There was quiet as everyone thought it over. Just the trees and the frogs and the ocean and everyone breathing without giving John any of the answers he was so closely listening for. Finally Carter nodded.

"Okay," she said. "I'll check on their clearance status. Run it by the General. Maybe he can talk them into two weeks."

Rodney lifted a hand to add to her to-do list. "We should probably get some of the tech here to work with them on..."

"Off base," Sam clarified, just to reiterate how tall of an order he was suggesting. McKay nodded, without a hint of awareness of the incredulous look on the woman's face.

"Yes. _Preferably_ some of the broken command ops panels. They might not be broken. They might just be dormant," he said. John noticed Rodney was very careful not to look directly at Sam, something the nerd-side seemed to demand of him every time Rodney belatedly realized he was challenging someone with the power to send him to an assignment in Siberia.

Sam looked at John then, frowning. And because John knew just a little about politics growing up a rich boy from the social elite, he offered her his very best puppy-dog eyes expression that always seemed to work on Elizabth and Teyla. Carter rolled her eyes and waved the whole thing off.

"Fine. I'll see what I can get sent over," she said after a frustrated sigh.

*~*~*

"I in no way, did not once, volunteer for kitchen cleanup."

Rodney trudged up the stairs after John, unhappy and wet and smelling vaguely of apple-scented soap. It was the first thing with any kind of synthetic smell to it that he had been around in two days and he kept sniffing at his shirt to make sure it wasn't his imagination. Also, his head ached like nothing else, he probably should have had Carson check the butterfly bandages to make sure the wound was fine, and the added annoyance of a very faint smell didn't help.

"You did. A vaguely worded promise of servitude in exchange for free meals. I promise you, I heard it," John replied. He sounded far too amused about it to be telling the truth. "It's been a long day, you just don't remember."

They got up to their floor and crossed to their room. John pulled the key card out of his pants pocket and Rodney worried briefly that the card had been gunkified and would be unreadable from all of John's adventures in nature that morning, before he remembered that John had changed clothes at some point since smelling like fish.

"Oh come on. You're gonna lose that," he still complained. John shrugged as he opened the door.

"Haven't carried a wallet in two years. Not about to start it up again until they don't give me a choice," he said.

"Admirable, but in the meantime, that's not the most idiotproof technology..." but Rodney wasn't fully committed to that particular argument just then. He dropped down onto the bed and started shedding his jacket. He was tired, and distracted, and thinking a dozen different directions at once. "Hey, speaking of idiots. Ronon said he's going to hit you with sticks tomorrow."

John paused as he closed the door, even found the light switch that he didn't need so that Rodney could actually see. "You mean _sparring_?"

"That's what I said, yeah," said Rodney.

"Well, the idea is to _block_ the sticks, not get beaten by them," said John. "That's the sparring part."

"But you haven't sparred in weeks." Rodney looked up at John as the man walked over to stand in front of him to hear out his newest complaint. "And you're kind of... sensitive... right now."

John frowned, his brows pinching together in adorable confusion. He even crossed his arms, defensive about it. "In what context? I feel like I was just insulted, _entirely_ unprovoked..."

"It wasn't an _insult_." Frustrated by the miscommunication, Rodney took a shortcut to make his point. He reached out and slid his hand easily under John's rumpled t-shirt to touch skin on skin. John reflexively lowered his elbow to trap his hand there, and there was no missing the way his knee buckled just slightly before Sheppard could get himself back under control. He stared down at Rodney, eyes slightly wide as he caught the point.

"Shit."

Rodney nodded at him. "Not a great plan."

John started to nod and then caught an idea. "What if it's just you?"

"I don't know. I wanted to ask about it all morning but I didn't want to ask awkward things..." Rodney trailed off because he was seeing very few ways around asking about awkward subjects. "I should have asked. The alternative is to find out during sparring."

John seemed to stall out. "I don't see that going well."

"Well, I wouldn't suggest going down there and asking anyone to touch you, either. That's... slightly weirder than average," said Rodney.

"We should ask Sandburg. This seems like a Sandburg question," said John. Rodney scrunched his nose at the thought of having to ask the straight-laced Ellison about it.

"It didn't come up in the stuff this morning," Rodney pointed out. "And... it's kind of a you thing... meaning a Sentinel thing. What if he doesn't even know about it?"

"Nope, not asking Ellison. He got on my case about wanting to try the static headphone things. He'll just tell me to tough it out," John replied. Rodney looked down at the place where John still held his hand clamped to his ribs. Fine. He could tough it out in their room. Where it was safe and he wouldn't collect any bruises for it.

Rodney caught John at the hip to tug him closer and then stood up. The surprise movement left John watching him and not paying attention to his hands so much, so Rodney slid his other hand up against the skin at his side and pushed both hands up to get the shirt off his head. John curled in on himself like he was shy - when they both knew he wasn't - and let out a long string of colorful swear words in reaction to the touch. Rodney tugged his shirt up and up until Sheppard figured out how to get his arms out of the sleeves again.

"You said the dials were working," Rodney said. "So try that. Turn down touch."

"I _need_ touch. Especially to fight. It's... an awareness thing," said John. His voice was ridiculously shaky and he was very mindful of where Rodney's hands rested at his ribs. Rodney left them there so John could reach to move them easier if he had to. His fingers crawled to poke at the stars on the tattoo there and John clamped his arm down over them again.

"Does it have to be that _high_?" Rodney asked. His lips curled up in a grin. "Look, if I could, I'd rewrite the program. The sensitivity is too high to be functional, so it has to go down."

The playful torment seemed to fade from John's face then and he shook his head. "Don't touch the gene, McKay. I wanna keep it. This. It stays."

That was a surprise. John had threatened just short of _mutiny_ on Atlantis if Carson couldn't figure out how to turn the ProX off, and now he trapped Rodney's hands like he was waiting for a promise _not_ to solve the genetic problem that had bothered them for a month.

"Wait, really? You _don't_ want me and Carson to figure out-"

"Nope. I was wrong before."

Rodney shifted how he held on to John, just enough closer. "It's probably not even possible. But... if we tried, we'd find out... Sandburg isn't _always_ right."

"He is on this stuff. Don't mess with it, alright?"

Rodney nodded. "Just means you're gonna have to figure out how to get the dials to work."

"I think I can do that," said John, with enough sass to sound cool again. Rodney dragged his thumb along the lower edge of John's ribs, just to make him eat his words. John shivered all the way up and bit his lip to keep from swearing again.

Rodney sighed. "Not without a lot of practice."

John made a vote in favor of practice when he leaned in to kiss him.

*~*~*

After dinner and the resulting mess of dishes were out of the way, Sheppard and Rodney were the first ones to disappear. Then Teyla, and Ronon not long after her. Stiles had a headache threatening from the smell of soap and Blair slid another mug of tea under his nose to balance it out.

"Sorry about the dish soap," Ellison had said. "I brought it from our place, long before we knew your situation."

"It's just soap," said Stiles with a dismissive shrug.

"Yeah. And your senses are more chaotic right now. Here's hoping it doesn't hit you like that again," replied Blair. "Literally a gust of wind could screw with your senses. There's just no predicting it until your immune system is done doing everything it's doing."

"How does he stop it?" Derek asked. "Everything I read talked about control techniques for stable Sentinel. What do they do in between?"

"Fake it," said Blair. "Try not to do things that are going to be asking for trouble. Natural homeopathy has some herbs and oils you can try, but since this is partly caused by exposure to tranqs, I really don't _want_ to try it. It could make it worse, or it could send you tripping, we have no way to know."

"Stiles is younger than anyone we usually work with, for one thing," said Ellison. The man was usually tense and looked annoyed, but since dinner he had been quiet and even smiled a few times, like a normal human instead of a military robot. "And for another, neither one of us can remember a case like this, and we've been at this for ten years. So anything we suggest is unknown territory."

"That's where Carson comes in, and all those tests to kinda... set up a starting point," added Blair, glancing over at the doctor still reading the ever-present book across the table from them. "It should be all downhill from there. Just have to wait out the chaos."

"But surely that will get better just from using his senses, right? The exposure and the normalcy would only help, shouldn't it?" Daniel asked. The guy was always asking nosy questions. Super curious. Like it was his job or something. Otherwise, he wasn't as annoying as Stiles had expected he would be in Colorado.

"That's the idea behind practice, sure. With anything," said Blair.

"But it's another story entirely when you're the one stuck with the headaches, and the pain, and the every little weird reaction that you have never had to deal with before," added Jim. "Without help, you go crazy. I had over a year of it in the jungle. Nothing ever really balanced out, everything was uncontrolled and didn't stick. My senses went dormant because I couldn't handle it without the tribe helping me. It took years to figure this stuff out the second time, once Sandburg figured out what he was doing."

"Oh, haha," said Blair, dryly amused at being blamed for his Sentinel's senses. Jim was amused and smiling at the joke. He looked back to Stiles.

"Honestly? He's your best bet right now," the man said, nodding toward Derek. "I got on Sheppard's case about it for being stupid. For a reason. In my experience, in every case I've seen come through this place, just having somebody you trust to watch your back makes the difference. It gives you a little more room to try testing yourself if you know somebody's there to course-correct when you start chasing after the stuff that isn't really there, or that will just lead to a zone out."

"Wait... what do you mean isn't really there?" Colonel Carter asked.

"Like shadows and ghosts," said Blair. "Some Sentinel see outside the standard spectrum. Actually, a lot of them have reported it, percentage-wise. I can find the numbers if you want. I try to steer clear of those reports. Gives me the creeps."

Stiles stared at his tea, suddenly worried about having to add ghosts to the list of supernatural things that had become just another part of his crazy life. "That's gonna be great."

"Ghosts don't have teeth and claws," Derek pointed out beside him. "You'll be fine."

Stiles glanced up and, smirked a little, and halfheartedly bared the fangs he didn't have as a mock challenge to his friend the werewolf. Derek had a point. He had been beat up so many times already by asshole humans, lizard-faced kanimas, and Alpha werewolves, so the worst a ghost could do would be try to scare him to death. "Bring it on, Casper."

"Hey! Not so loud, will ya? Don't bring that stuff in here. Jim and I still gotta walk home," said Blair. It was only half for laughs, according to the panic Stiles could easily hear from him. Stiles laughed a little and relaxed again.

"So. Speaking of leaving. Before I get nailed to the floor tomorrow by the admins," Blair began. His tone had gotten slower and more cautious, but he was still plenty nervous about something from what Stiles could hear. "I kinda need to run something by you guys."

Everyone was quiet for a moment, waiting for the apparently important newsflash from the knowledgeable Guide at the table.

"There's actually a waiting list for the program. This one. The Project. Usually about a few weeks, but sometimes longer," Blair said. He tapped absently on the table, a nervous tell if Stiles ever saw one, until Jim slid his hand flat along the tabletop to interfere with the noise. Blair froze up, apologetic, but carried on talking. "And this month's section was pretty full up. So I kind of made an executive decision on my part. Purely paperwork stuff. Shouldn't be a big deal. But you should probably be aware of it."

"Should I legally be a part of this conversation?" asked Carter, because everything about Blair just then screamed _guilty-conscience_.

"Legally? Uhm..." Blair floundered a moment.

"He snuck Stiles and Derek in under Sheppard's team," said Ellison, ripping off the band-aid. "Not separate files."

"Oh..." said Colonel Carter. She didn't seem to know what to do with the information.

"So just, if anybody asks, if it gets brought up... maybe just... stick with that particular story," Blair said, passing it off as a helpful suggestion. Daniel glanced around from face to face.

"Well. I guess it's technically true. They did bring them in," he said. Everyone looked to Carson even as Stiles sunk a little in his chair.

"Wha- well, yes, it... I mean, yes. I did ask. It was a request under my purview. As Chief Medical Officer of... my post... but I didn't realize-"

"SGC is picking up the tab either way," pointed out Daniel. "Payroll is still classified. Nobody's going to be able to dig into it. And Jack would just shut them down anyway if they tried. Whether it's Sheppard's team, or the CMO's. What do they care here?"

"Yes. _That_. Basically. Only counts on paperwork within the Project," said Blair. Stiles stared at the adults at the table with him, jaw slack.

"Wait a minute- _tab_? I can't- we can't pay for this," he said quickly. It somehow hadn't occurred to him, after six months of being shuttled through doctors offices and social workers' offices and foster agencies he never paid for that the help he had received so far might be racking up any kind of a tab.

"Aye, we know that, lad," said Carson. "I asked for a favor, your help to learn more of this new ProX impact. It's all unique to you, apparently, so we have no other way of getting to the bottom of it. This is still part of that. We don't know yet what will come of it. But neither of you are responsible for it."

Stiles wanted to ask why they would spend any more money on him than they already had, but he was afraid to. He didn't know Carter, other than to know she outranked Sheppard and everyone else. If anyone had the say to pull the plug on Carson's favor and steal Stiles' werewolf, it was going to be her. Asking about details seemed like a bad idea. But so did any kind of debt hanging over his head.

"So you're saying, if anyone asks, we, what, work for Colonel Sheppard?" asked Derek, somehow completely chill about it.

"Yes," said Blair again. "Simple as that."

"That's... splitting a really fine hair," said Carter. "Are you going to get in trouble for that?"

"Only if I get caught," said Blair. "But even then, it's not like they're going to fire me over it."

"You're probably a very terrible influence on most of the people here," said Daniel, but the man was just short of laughing as he said it. He looked to Sam. "We would never sneak a team into the program under false pretenses."

Carson raised his hand off the table slightly. "You mean, for instance, that such as Director Weir requested, to allow me to sit at this table and read this very book?"

"Fine with me," said Derek. Stiles wanted to kick him for it. "I'd have been dead two days ago without Colonel Sheppard's help. I'll sign up."

Stiles did kick him for that. "He said it was because of Rodney."

Derek looked over at him with that even, calm, unreadable mask. "Pretty sure he also said Rodney wasn't his boss. The call went to Sheppard and I'm not dead."

Stiles looked to Carson and then Blair and Ellison. Derek wasn't his boss, either, and Stiles was nervous about the risk. Ellison seemed to know he was anxious.

"It's a small thing, Stiles. Really. And nobody in Admin is a Sentinel so it should fly under their radar," he said. "It's literally just... a filing detail. Blair is just a habitual _liar_."

Blair scoffed at that but didn't defend himself. Stiles looked back to Derek. Maybe this was one of those instances where he was supposed to trust Derek's judgment over his own fuzzy senses. He finally nodded.

"Where he goes, I go," he reported. "So if anybody asks, we're on John's team. On paper."

"Awesome," said Blair. "Just had to get everybody's story straight before Admin shows up in the morning. Should have caught John on it but he disappeared pretty quick."

"I'll brief him on it when we go on a run," said Jim, quiet. That caught Carson's attention.

"Run?"

"Jog, really. He's pretty rusty," said Jim.

"Aye, but just a run? No more swimming in the ocean and showing up smelling like fish guts as he was at the chopper this morning. His arm needs to _heal_ ," said the doctor. Ellison shook his head.

"He's not going to like that, but I'll tell him," the Sentinel said. He looked to Stiles. "You should come out with us. It may help."

"That sounds like work," muttered Stiles, sinking a little lower over his mug of cold tea.

"Not really. It's easy compared to the rest," said Ellison. He looked over at the doctor who had just told him off for letting Sheppard take a swim. "As long as the kid is medically cleared, anyway, doc?"

"He can try it. Though _only_ for running," said Carson. "If either of them get back having taken a swim, we'll have words."

"I'm curious," said Carter, grinning at the exchange. "Is Rodney roped in to this, too?"

"Colonel, the man was in the _hospital_ two days ago. Let's not put him back in it yet," replied Carson. Colonel Carter smiled down at her hands on the tabletop like she was trying not to laugh. Derek seemed amused, too, as he looked over at Stiles.

"Great. I can sleep in," he said, because he was a traitor and a jerk.

"Nope. Paperwork. I’m sure you and I have a half hour's worth of extra work because he's not eighteen," said Blair. "We set it up, the Admin approves it, and they give us fifteen days to get his guardian to sign off on it. We'll figure that detail out this weekend."

That caught Stiles' attention. "What if I don't want my guardians to know where I am?"

"This place isn't exactly on the map," Blair pointed out. "And there is a facility in Alexandria."

"That's still a fifty-fifty shot, and that number gets a lot bigger considering we were just in Beacon Hills," said Derek.

"This is the sorta stuff we figure out in the morning," said Blair. He opened his hands to show that he had no contracts sitting in front of him. "I've never even looked at the minor request files. I just know it gets complicated and needs extra signatures."

"Say we get Argent to sign me off... How long would I be in the program?" Stiles asked.

"Depends. At the end of the session they look at scores and assignments are drawn. You're not military, so it opens up a few private sector opportunities. If you wanted them," said Jim. "The full training itself, that could take a few months."

Stiles frowned. "I thought Sheppard's team was only here a week," he said.

"Maybe talking two," offered Sam Carter. "I'm still going to have to check the transportation schedule."

"So how does that help _you_?" Derek asked, looking to Carson.

"Don't know yet," replied the doctor, his attention back on the book in his hands. "Depends on the Colonels."

Stiles watched the doctor evade in real time, mildly shocked. "Hey, wait-" he began, then stopped himself, stuck on how to politely call him out on a lie.

"I have to request we bring materials out here for Dr. Beckett to access. It's going to take a day or two, and a few different levels of approvals," said Colonel Carter.

"Possibly their own security detail," added Daniel.

"So more stuff like the tracker?" Blair asked. Carter nodded.

"Cool," said Stiles, only slightly settled by the explanation.

"Colonel Carter has already had to change plans on this stuff three times since Colonel Sheppard actually got back," Daniel said. "So nothing is really set in stone until it happens."

"Except the paperwork," Blair chimed in. "Effective tomorrow, once they fill things out, Sheppard's stuck with what he's got because everything from us gets filed with every state and federal agency as a Sentinel on Record. And we've got fifteen days to get you on your feet and understanding all that mess, Stiles. So ask questions when you've got them."

Stiles had so many questions. But asking them required getting his ADHD brain to settle on a single one at a time, and more than that, required him to figure out if he trusted the people offering to help.

"Are there any more notebooks? Rodney had one earlier," Stiles asked. "Maybe... maybe I can write stuff down."

Blair jumped to his feet and went to one of the cupboards built into the wall across from the kitchen area. He came back with three notebooks and a whole box of pens. It wasn't a surprise when Derek stole one of the notebooks. A computer would be better, a good laptop, with the internet, and some access to the outside world would be nice, too, but Stiles didn't figure they had those just lying around.

He was starting to feel at least a little better. Stiles could work with what he had.

*~*~*


	29. Chapter 29

The exposure therapy idea didn't seem to work as fast as John wanted it to. Even with Rodney's help that night, Sheppard couldn't get the body-touch response to settle down. And that was a pleasurable touch, he was just too amped up and it registered as strongly as pain. He had tried controlling it the way he had with the water, with the meditation breathing, and it made a dent but not much. Not enough to spar. One blow on the shoulder or back and Sheppard would buckle like an accordion to the mats.

It actually happened in his dreams and it disturbed him. He hadn't fought Ronon and lost, he fought some damn Daturan with claws. The Daturan guards Sheppard had dealt with on the prison planet were all the same yellow-blonde hair and light colored eyes, somehow, even though the people of Datura had been just as varied as any other planet. The ruling class had mostly the same look as the guards. But none of them, in the over two weeks he had been stuck in their company, had ever sprouted _claws_.

Dreams themselves weren't scary, really. The stuff they left stuck in the brain when he woke up was the problem. John remembered fighting, one hand pinned down from those stupid living handcuffs they used, and the other had a burning tree branch, waving it around like it was one of the fighting staffs. He started out the fight doomed to lose for that alone. And within two blows he was on the ground, staring up at a blind man with a bladed staff to his collar.

There was no going back to sleep after that. It was around five am and McKay somehow slept right through John's dream, so his wake up call must not have been as bad as it made him feel. All the same, John wasn't going to hang around and risk waking him up with another one. He had to sneak off the end of the bed since the two beds were shoved in the corner by the wall, and Rodney had this thing about hugging the open edge. The guy was pretty much as weird as John expected he'd be in a lot of ways and it was great. But being trapped in bed every night and having to crawl out would take a minute to get used to.

He managed to get dressed and carried his shoes out to the hall so he wouldn't wake McKay. Then he sat himself down on the top stair step to deal with his boots. He would grab something to eat and then figure out what to do with the next three hours of his life.

A door behind him unlocked and Sheppard turned back to make sure it wasn't Rodney. The upper level of the odd-shaped building had three rooms that opened on a simple lounge area, not very big, and the light overhead was a skylight rather than extra electrical beyond a few dim lights by the door locks. John was surprised to see the door to Ronon's room open and Teyla step out. At just before 5:30 in the morning. Teyla, he knew, was an early riser. But Ronon tended to prefer a late night to an early morning, unless there was fun to be had. John blindly finished tying his shoes as he very easily witnessed his two teammates share a parting smooch before Teyla closed the door behind her.

There wasn't really anything to be done about it now. John would be well and truly busted for snooping the second Teyla spotted him. So he just leaned against the wall and offered her a broad grin.

"Morning, Teyla," he said, quiet. Teyla still startled, not fully having seen the black-clad shadow seated on the stairs until he spoke.

"Colonel!" she hissed at him. John double checked his shoes before standing up. He held a finger over his lips and waved for her to keep her voice down.

"McKay's still out," he said. He pointed to the room across from his. "And that's Stiles' room."

"What are you doing out here?" Teyla asked, sounding somewhat annoyed in the face of Sheppard's amusement.

"I could ask you the same thing, but I figure you know where your room is, probably don't need the reminder," he said, with all the innocence he could muster as the team lead. He waved toward the stairs. " _I_ was headed to find breakfast."

Teyla narrowed her eyes at him, but there was just enough of a grin tugging at her lips that he wasn't immediately concerned for his safety as she tugged on his elbow to march him down the stairs.

"You shouldn't sneak," she scolded at him.

"I wasn't! I came out to tie my shoes, I swear," he promised.

"Right."

"Hey, the soundproofing in this place is really great. I had no idea at all about you kids," he said, hands lifted in genuine refusal of guilt. "If _you're_ up here instead of rooming with Carter, do ya think we need to be worried about Carson in with Dr. Jackson, or..."

Teyla punched his arm just close enough to his ribs, something that John ordinarily would have laughed at as fairplay roughhousing since they were teammates and sparring partners often enough. He _knew_ what it _should_ have felt like. And instead her knuckles hit his side as she bumped in with a body check on the stairs and John stumbled as the pain hit. Actual pain, too, not the kind that felt good, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. His knee still buckled and he caught her arm and the wall to keep them both from falling down the last few steps. Teyla gasped, their teasing gone, replaced by concern.

"John? What happened?" She was stable first and helped him keep his balance as he tried to get his legs to support himself again.

"That's a bit of a story..." he managed. He caught his breath, tried again, and jumped down the last few steps. Survival of the fittest and if instinct wasn't going to save his ass on a jump, there was a problem. The trick worked and he just kept walking, waving for Teyla to catch up.

"I don't think I can fight yet," he said, trying not to get angry at himself about it. It was a setback, nothing permanent. "Certain spots won't... cooperate."

Teyla processed it and then nodded. "Breakfast first," she decided. "Then we can work on this."

*~*~*

After a quick scrounge for something close to breakfast fare without cooking, Sheppard explained the basics of the problem Rodney had helped him discover. Thankfully they found it early, before John got surprised by it in a fight, but it was still a problem in training. If he hadn't known about it, even in a sparring fight, Ronon could have done real damage without intending to.

Teyla's solution was only slightly less daunting than Ronon accidentally aiming a follow-up strike for John's gut and taking his head off instead as he crumpled from the first hit. Hand to hand sparring, with no sticks, and more choreographed to training. It was still not something to be tried with Ronon, but Sheppard trusted Teyla's power control more than the Satedan's.

The pair took off on a jog around the foggy campus for a suitable place to fight that wouldn't disturb any of the Sentinel who may yet be sleeping at dawn. Even after warm ups and meditation, controlling his breathing as best he could to shore himself up, John lasted only a few light blows before he was on his knees. His back, shoulders, and ribs had zero tolerance. He could survive strikes to his legs with far less pain involved, but the feedback the pain in his back sent across his limbs made his legs unreliable.

"Maybe it just takes time," suggested Teyla's voice of reason. The logic might have worked, except this was only a recently _discovered_ problem, just another symptom to something John had been dealing with for a month. He had put in the time.

"That would be inconvenient," said Sheppard. He struggled back to his feet on his own and tried again. This time, he reluctantly combined the other tricks with the dials, lowering touch as he had after the swim in the bay, and trying to accommodate for it by raising sight. It felt like cheating, but the sun was out and it lit up the fog around them well, so Teyla had no trouble seeing. John hoped it would be enough to make up for the disadvantage in his spatial awareness.

Teyla got in two controlled hits, the first to his ribs and then a few steps later to his back. The recovery time was shorter, but still required. John kept his feet under him, which was an improvement. He blocked her next hit but wasn't quick enough to play more than defense.

When Teyla disappeared from his view after he dodged one of her kicks, Sheppard nudged up the dial on his hearing as he stepped in toward her. It brought him in close and he landed an elbow in her stomach, the first hit he had been able to make. The problem was, it was his left side, and the brace couldn't protect against a backwards blow like that. Landing the hit had little effective difference from being hit, in surface impact, and the tiny fracture in his wrist complained against it.

Already hyper-focused on hearing and seeing his opponent, Sheppard zoned out in the middle of a controlled, low-powered fight. He landed face first in fog-drenched dirt and October leaves, just barely missing his startled partner.

*~*~*

The door pounding was not a good way to wake up. A surprised and confused Rodney rolled right out of bed, scrambling to protect his head as he landed. He peeked up to see if John was any more aware of the door pounding than he was, but the man wasn't there.

"McKay! Open the door!" It was Ronon's voice. That couldn't be good. Rodney struggled to his feet, gave up the fight with the sheet and just stayed wrapped up in it enough to get to the door. He was more than decent, as he checked to make sure he still had on the clothes he had gone to sleep in before getting to the light switch and the door. Ronon stood there, looking agitated and seething like a really tall buffalo.

"What-"

"Get dressed. Sheppard zoned out and won't snap out of it," Ronon said, hand on the door to make sure he was listened to. Rodney blinked at him.

"Wait- John? What time-" Rodney left the door to go check the bathroom.

"Oh six hundred. He's not here. Let's. Go," said Ronon. He stood inside the door, probably judging the arrangement of the mess and Rodney had to ignore him to find his clothes.

"How do _you_ know where he is?" he asked as he searched. Ronon waved a small black box in his hand.

"The rest of us still have radios," said Ronon. Rodney swore at the annoyance and grabbed clothes.

"How do you _not_ know where he is?" Ronon asked, smirking at the room. He was a friend and a teammate and he was teasing, but Rodney wasn't in the mood for the logic.

"Oh shut up," Rodney returned. He kicked free of the tangled up sheet and stood up to see Derek and Stiles crowded in the door behind Ronon. It was six am and the morning kept getting better. Great.

A minute later they were tromping down the stairs and Rodney pounded on Carson's door to demand the Life Signs Detector. The second he had it, and Ronon's radio, in hand he made his way out of the building, leaving Ronon to explain it to Carson and the curious Daniel. Stiles stumbled after Rodney.

"He's gonna be fine, you don't have to go," Rodney said as they cleared the front door.

"Maybe I can help you find them," Stiles said. Considering they were outside and staring at a wall of fog and the long shadows of trees from an eastern sun, Rodney wasn't going to turn down the help. Rodney knew better than to try for more than a brisk walk when he was going in blind, so started moving in roughly the direction Ronon had told him to start.

"Teyla? Can you give me a location?" Rodney asked into the handheld radio. The tiny earwig comms were so much better. He was tired and missed Atlantis. And he was going to kick John Sheppard in the ass. "All I see is fog. And trees."

He waited for the radio to click back.

"What'd he mean a zone out?" Stiles asked.

"He stops breathing sometimes. Well, kinda," said Rodney. Then he remembered he was talking to the baby Sentinel who wasn't quite experiencing all the joys of the condition yet and realized that was a shitty explanation to give the kid. He tried again, reciting the definition from the book without too much effort. It was a useful distraction.

"We screwed up at first, we didn't know what they were, so I guess Carson's way of helping was making it worse-" Rodney broke off at the chirp from the radio and Teyla's voice offering new directions. _Of course_ they had gone down the hill. At least it was paved and not an animal trail.

"Anyway, he was doing okay since we got off the Daedalus. At least, better at breathing anyway," Rodney finished. Hopefully it was more helpful an explanation than some horror story the kid made up in his own head. The last thing Rodney needed was two downed Sentinel. That was a good way to fail Guide school.

"What's the Daedalus?" asked Stiles.

"Uhm. A ship. How we get to our post," replied Rodney. He wasn't falling for the planet trap that Blair caught him on. Especially not from a young, clever Sentinel who could probably figure out if he was lying.

"Like, Atlantis?"

_Oh god._

"When did _you_ start asking questions?" Rodney managed, stalling.

"I like _asking_ questions, just not answering them," replied Stiles. "Is it the Daedalus that takes you to Atlantis?"

"Technically."

"Go that way," said Stiles suddenly, pointing him off the sidewalk. "How far away is it?"

"Three weeks, give or take." These were harmless questions, Rodney told himself, all perfectly safe and completely deniable later.

"And the ship has the ancient technology that me and Sheppard can make work?" Stiles asked. At least the kid seemed to have an idea where to go. Rodney clicked the radio mic in his hand, enough to make it make noise on Teyla's end. He checked the screen on the LSD but there was still no one showing up.

"It has some of it," he said. He considered the screen and then handed it to Stiles. "Look for John and Teyla."

Stiles slowed down a step as he tried to figure out the screen again, and Rodney watched as the LSD blinked and snowed over and then refocused. Two very tiny dots showed up in a far corner. The device was responding to Stiles and boosted the range.

"Damn," Rodney muttered, impressed and jealous despite himself. He could do so many amazing things with Ancient tech that liked _him_ that much. It was being wasted in the hands of men who wouldn't care to use it appropriately.

"What? Damn what?"

Rodney pointed to the screen. "The Daedalus did that for John on the way out here. It's... an impressive new feature."

He raised the radio to escape more questions. "We're on the way. How's John?"

The answer was quicker this time. "The same. I moved him, I have been talking to him, but there has been no change," said Teyla.

"What the hell were you doing out here?" Rodney replied, probably harsher than he should have. There were a few clicks on the radio and a definite quiet.

"Colonel Sheppard asked me to work with him. He is in no shape to spar with Ronon and we were trying to find out if there was a way around the problem you pointed out to him," said Teyla eventually.

Rodney lowered the radio and squinted up at the sky, giving up. Of course this was his fault. He lifted the radio again after a few steps. "Please tell Sheppard _I'm_ on my way to kick his ass this time."

There was a pause again and Rodney tucked the radio in a pocket, muttering about no one listening unless he yelled.

From the radio came Teyla's voice again: "Are you sure that's what will help him right now?"

"Yes. I am _absolutely_ positive," Rodney announced, but he didn't bother to click on the radio for it. Stiles was at least trying not to laugh at him. Rodney pointed at the screen in his hand.

"Are we still going the right way?" he asked. Stiles moved the screen so Rodney could see it and it looked almost like normal. They were centering in on Teyla and John, and probably within the one hundred yards range finally.

Stiles had to steer Rodney in the right direction a few times but they finally got to where Teyla was sitting, with John propped up against a tree.

"Come on, John, what the hell," complained Rodney, just on principle. All week, that's all he had been doing, walking in and waking up John and being ignored. And now he was outside, in the cold, in the fog. He crouched and checked the squinting, pained expression and the dirty face as he leaned in to make sure John was in fact still breathing. But his skin was eerily cold.

"Colonel Sheppard, come in," Rodney said. "Earth to Sheppard. As in, you're gonna be stuck here. _Forever_..."

Rodney knew not to touch shoulders and sides, since they had been sparring and likely triggered the zone out from the trouble spots. He caught at John's hand and tried to get his fingers to warm up at least. Talking usually did the trick in the infirmary, that was how even Carson knew about the Guide thing. John always responded once Rodney started running his mouth, but maybe the zone outs weren't quite that Pavlovian.

"Come on, John. This is the one thing I'm bad at and you go and pick me," he said, his voice a whisper as he ducked in closer. It wasn't quite enough to see his chest rise and fall, Rodney needed to hear and feel that he was still breathing. _Without_ touching his chest. It was going to make Rodney crazy. They were probably looking at ten minutes, which wasn't much compared to the six hour zone out at the SGC, but it was the first time Rodney was the first responder.

He shifted to kneel and rest back on his heels, trying to get himself to focus. And suddenly realized that Stiles sat a few feet away, looking anxious.

"He doesn't sound right," Stiles said.

"No. He's... not consciously breathing and it's... not unlike drowning, I imagine," said Rodney, frowning. "He said he always wakes up with his chest hurting."

"Then kiss him," said Stiles. Rodney stared at the teen.

"What!" Rodney spluttered. "He can't _breathe_!"

"It's dumb, but my friend Lydia did it when I was having a panic attack, it works," said Stiles. "And come on, man, I saw what you guys did to that room."

"Oh god." Rodney scrubbed at his face.

"Rodney," said Teyla. He looked over at her, expecting a scolding. Instead she was her calm self, despite the frown on her face. "It will be okay. He trusts you. Calm down and trust yourself."

Rodney couldn't help but squint up at her, slowly trying to sort out what the words even meant. But she had a point. He usually wasn't panicked when he had accidentally brought John around in the infirmary. And the man said he listened for Rodney, either his stupid voice or his heartbeat, whichever one was least obnoxious at the time, according to John's teasing. Maybe it made a difference.

John was safe and he was breathing, and Teyla had been trying to help him, so she wouldn't have hurt him. So Rodney caught his hands again and quietly took an out-loud accounting of the fact that they were safe, and pointed out that John was welcome to stop freezing all of them to death in the fog because they left the werewolf at the dorm, and Stiles didn't seem to be volunteering to go back and get anyone armed enough to protect them from the dangerous California squirrel population...

"And honestly, I really don't think that tree is going to be comfortable for too much longer," Rodney observed as he ran out of other things to ramble on about. John's fingers closed around his, finally, and Rodney's attention went immediately to his face. "Really? The tree? You come back because of the _tree_?"

John tugged at his hand as he coughed and came back to himself. He squinted around at brighter sunlight and thinner fog and found Rodney finally. He tried to move away from the tree and Rodney helped get him sitting up again. On his own. Slouched and looking sore. Rodney leaned forward enough to rest his forehead to John's, and John leaned toward him.

"Next time, try the kiss thing first. Maybe it'll work," John said, his voice a little harsh from nearly twenty minutes of breathing wrong.

"Next time, _snap out of it_ and come get it yourself," replied Rodney. "I said they had to be hot and _breathing_. Very clearly remember saying that. _Mandatory_ prerequisites for me."

The invitation was well received and John turned just enough to claim the kiss he had asked for. Rodney was glad to oblige.

*~*~*

Sheppard wasn't looking forward to facing the music on this one. There was no way it had been done quietly. Teyla had called Ronon on the radio for help and Ronon didn't _help_ quietly. The whole building was probably in on the failure by now. And now he felt exhausted. But he couldn't exactly sit outside and have a nap, either.

So when Rodney stood up and ordered them back for breakfast time, Sheppard didn't argue. Just took his hand and followed.

"So this means we don't have to go on a run later, right?" Stiles asked on the way. Sheppard huffed out a laugh.

"No, that is _not_ what this means," said Sheppard. "It means I need to go jump in the ocean and then go on a run again until I get this thing kicked."

"Carson said no more swimming," said Stiles. Sheppard stared straight ahead and weighed the consequences of disobeying medical orders when he wasn't _technically_ on active duty anymore. Rodney tightened his grip almost painfully and Sheppard could feel the glare.

"Fine. Then there _will_ be running," said the obviously outranked Lt. Colonel. He carefully extracted his hand from Rodney's before he could break his right appendages too and tucked it more safely at Rodney's back. Even bought off the glare with a quick kiss. It put them side by side and the light touch had to help trick his brain into calming down eventually.

"So does the _we_ mean Carson cleared you for torture _I mean training_ too?" Sheppard asked, looking back over at Stiles.

"Just running. And also, you missed it, but Blair said he lied and told his bosses that Derek and I are on your team, so everyone is supposed to stick to that story or he'll get his ass handed to him by the Admins," Stiles replied. Sheppard raised his eyebrows at that, surprised.

"Well, that's interesting."

Rodney glanced over at Stiles and Teyla and then poked a knuckle in John's hip. Sheppard grimaced but got the hint.

"We could make that happen if you wanted," he said finally, looking over at Stiles. "Just so happens I've got room on the team for another pain in the ass Sentinel and his werewolf Guide."

The offer strangely didn't seem to surprise the kid. Stiles nodded faintly. "On Atlantis."

Sheppard stopped walking because that was a problem. He looked to Teyla and Rodney and saw plainly on their faces that he was the only one surprised by it. _Oh, that's just great._

"Ideally, yes," said Sheppard, crossing his arms to deal with the situation in Lt. Colonel-mode. "Which _incidentally_ means it's classified so I feel the very pressing urge to ask how you know."

Stiles stuck his hands in his pockets and tried to lie his way out of it but then quickly changed tracks. "Snitches get stitches provided by werewolf claws. I'll take the fifth."

_Goddamnit_. Sheppard was inclined to let that one slide for creativity.

"Okay, then, _What_ do you know?" he asked instead.

"That Atlantis isn't _here_. And you have to get there on the Daedalus. And the stuff on the ship reacts to whatever it is that makes us Sentinels, which is the whole reason Carson wanted to help me," said Stiles.

"Well, not the _whole_ reason," said Rodney. "I mean, he's _Carson_."

Sheppard clapped a hand blindly over McKay's mouth to keep from getting off track. International security fuckups had apparently happened. There were larger problems.

"So. Pretend what you think you know is about one inch off the top tip of the iceberg. Do you want to sign up and see the rest?" Sheppard asked.

The kid bounced a little on his toes, wincing as he looked anywhere but at Sheppard. "Maybe?"

" _Maybe_ is a good direction," replied John. "How do we get you to _yes_ without further compromising security classifications?"

"Can... I mean. I've been thinking about this all night. I think it could work... can we bring my dad? Maybe he has the stuff- the gene, too, right?" Stiles rambled out.

The question kicked the breath out of Sheppard as good as a kick from Ronon. He knew the kid was messed up and hurt, but this was a whole new level of really going through it. Teyla reached out and touched the boy's shoulder, concern on her face plain. Rodney looked exactly as stunned as John felt.

"Stiles, man... I asked Carter to look into your dad, like I said I would," John said, careful not to spook someone who was apparently having a hard morning. "He was a good man with a good record, and I'd have him on my team in a hot minute. But he _died_ six months ago. You told me that. You _know_ that."

Stiles shook his head. "No. Ask Derek. The Alphas took him. Everyone else just assumed that it was Dad who died because he disappeared after the explosion. But... he's alive and they've got him. I can't just leave him there."

"Shit," muttered John. He rubbed at the tension headache creeping in over his eyes.

"I know it's crazy, but it really happened. I saw him. Derek saw him. This isn't the tranquilizers talking or something," Stiles insisted. "He was _really_ alive a week ago."

Sheppard looked to Rodney, waiting for some sort of genius solution to strike. Stiles was telling a crazy tale, but he fully believed it. The anxiousness John could read from him wasn't a lie. And if John could believe in werewolves and watch them heal themselves as effectively as any Wraith in seconds, he could believe a premature death report after an explosion. Even Rodney nodded his head slightly before shrugging. He didn't have anything useful, but he believed the kid.

"Okay... we'll talk to Carter," he said. "If she okays it, we bring you on board. And we'll figure out how to find your dad."

Stiles visibly relaxed, even smiled, easily for the first time since John had met the kid. "Really?"

Sheppard nodded. "Really. We can try. It's a win/win for all of us if it pans out," he said. He crossed his arms and squared up a little. "So before I hang us all on this going sideways... no more surprises. Anything else you're not telling me?"

The relief faded remarkably quickly. "Uhm."

"Yes?"

"He got bit. He's, uh. He's a werewolf," said Stiles.

"Annnd there it is." Sheppard stepped back and had to mentally shake it off. He had been afraid of that. Some myths still had to be true, after all. The bite of a werewolf transferring the curse like a virus to a new carrier had to have been at least slightly true. And Sheppard had one on the team now, because he had just promised the kid. Not his best move.

"Hold on! Are you- are you serious? They just... bite people, and _instant werewolf_?" Rodney asked quickly.

"Werewolves _heal_. The rest of us don't," Stiles pointed out. "Whoever bit him saved his life. But the Alphas picked him up and nobody knew."

"Oh god." Rodney looked like he needed to sit down. John caught his arm and pulled him a step closer to keep him from wandering off to have a panic attack.

"Will Derek explain all this to Beckett? How it works?" he asked instead. "I want to help. And I want you both on my ship. But I can't put a whole city at any kind of risk."

"Derek's not-"

"It's not Derek I'm worried about," Sheppard interrupted. "You said there's good guys and bad guys, and I've met the good guys. It's the _bad_ werewolves who picked up your dad. The _bad_ ones who worked you over. I don't want to leave anybody behind, but I'm not sure I can trust your father around my people, either."

Stiles calmed down again, shook his head. "I don't know."

"Right. So. One thing at a time," said John. He took a deep breath and tried again. "You're on the team. And Derek. And I can't promise anything else, other than we'll do _everything possible_ to get your dad safe. Fair?"

Stiles nodded quickly. "I can help. I've been doing this stuff for years now."

"What stuff? Werewolf stuff?" Rodney asked, sounding mildly horrified at best.

"Yeah. I'm used to it. And I stole this book from the hunters- a Bestiary,"

"Care to share the book?" Sheppard asked. Stiles hesitated.

"I don't actually have it anymore. It's in my stuff. At Argent's place," the kid said. "But I know a lot about helping Derek."

"Well, if you're not going back to Beacon Hills, I guess we'll need to pick up your stuff before we head home," said John.

He was dumb. He was gonna get court-martialed again, and he loved those tiny impersonal court rooms and cranky judges so much. But damned if there wasn't a voice in his head saying it would work out. They couldn't just leave Noah Stilinski stuck behind enemy lines and _run off with his kid_.

Maybe Atlantis needed the gene, and it would help out the entire Pegasus Project, but that was the cowardly way to do it. It wasn't something Sheppard could stomach.

Carter was going to kill him. Hopefully she did it quick, _before_ General O'Neill got a hold of him.

*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ____________________________________________
> 
> Shit. I gotta change the tags again. Sigh.  
> ____________________________________________


	30. Chapter 30

Ellison made them run, but he didn't let John jump in the water as they ran by it. It had been months since lacrosse practice and Stiles was fairly certain he was going to die trying to keep up with a couple of old guys. One was Army, one was Air Force, and Stiles felt like he had failed as the son of a Marine. Running just wasn't his thing, unless there was significant reason to fear actual death-by-monster if he didn't.

Stiles felt like electrified jelly as he crashed into the chair in the Admin office later. He felt amped up and itchy, and things were _quite_ loud. Blair had shoved a travel mug of tea in his hand before letting him leave for the meeting with Sheppard and the Admins. It was too hot to drink, but Derek told him it should have been fine. It sat on the desk in front of him for cooling instead.

The Admins were government people, based on the suits. One of them wore an Air Force uniform and had a Sentinel tattoo. Stiles didn't pay attention to the introductions because nobody really looked at him. They kept their voices quiet and dealt with Derek and with Rodney.

Stiles sat next to Sheppard and had a front row seat to watch the Lieutenant Colonel slowly _lose his shit_ as he was calmly placated and ignored every time he tried to say something. Rodney was frazzled by it, more quietly angry, like he wanted to tell people off but didn't think he'd be allowed to. There was a stack of paperwork in front of him that he was supposed to help fill out and arguing with the guys in the suits didn't seem a good way to get it done.

The stack in front of Derek was a lot smaller, but Stiles wasn't sure what everything was. He recognized the forms from the DMV, but everything else was unknown, and he didn't have a copy.

What it turned out to be was their entire legal lives on paper. Stiles had a tiny credit card bill and a driver's license in his name. But Sheppard had a house, a car, a motorcycle, six credit cards and a few other old lines of credit, a will, his pilot's license, his DMV, a CCW, all of his military records, and a partridge in a pear tree that had to be spelled out for Rodney McKay to cosign and assume responsibility for. The only thing that wasn't there was an application for a library card.

McKay had to fill out his own paperwork, first for American citizenship because apparently the man didn't just _talk_ like a _Canadian_ , and second to enlist as a member of the US Air Force. He looked shocked when the Air Force representative clarified that he would be starting out at the Lieutenant Colonel's rank, that any promotions (or demotions) would be applied as a unit. The 1999 court-martial on Lt. Colonel Sheppard's record, however, would not follow to McKay's new one, the airman said, as it well pre-dated the gene activation and was a closed matter. Stiles stared, slouched in his chair, and his mind tumbling with questions he somehow managed not to ask.

McKay looked quite pale and the cut across his forehead stood out bright red behind the white butterfly bandages. Sheppard was more red and angry but he had stopped doing anything other than sign where he was told to once McKay signed the application for US citizenship.

Stiles and Derek sat in absolute silence as each form was walked through completely. It was glaringly obvious that the transfer of responsibility went one way. Like the guy with the ProX gene couldn't be trusted with it, or with themselves, and had to be looked after and vouched for.

Stiles remembered seeing Colonel Sheppard out in the preserve that morning, stuck in some strange kind of coma, and McKay stuck trying to talk him out of it. Someone had to make the call on whether a Sentinel needed to be put on or removed from life support, and that apparently carried with it the requirement of keeping the rest of their life on track.

Derek didn't like it but he signed where he was told when the Admins got around to Stiles and then passed the page to Stiles. The bottom of the stack got down to the Power of Attorney, with a formal medical diagnosis attached. That one was signed by a couple of doctors, Dr. Beckett as first reporter and Dr. Frasier as the confirmation. Stiles remembered meeting Dr. Frasier at the base in Colorado, she had checked in on Stiles when Carson was forced off the clock, and apparently she had double-checked his work on the genetic markers. Just asking for help had set off a fast and hard chain of events that Stiles was stuck with now.

"What would have happened if the Guide wasn't on here?" Stiles asked as he stared at his friend's signature on the Power of Attorney letter, still hesitating to lock them both in to it.

"A caseworker would have to be assigned for emergencies and, for medical and financial reasons, you would become a dependent of the State," said one of the suits. Next to him, Sheppard crossed his arms and muttered a few more-than-four-letter words into his shirt collar. Stiles had never signed his name so fast in his life.

"Now, according to the Project records, Stilinski is a member of Lt. Colonel Sheppard's team with the SGC, but he is not yet eighteen years of age-" began the lead suit.

"We have a _civilian_ task force," said Sheppard. "I have _civilians_ under my command. No age requirement."

"The Sentinel Project is also a civilian project, and requires acknowledging documentation that the Sentinel is still too young to be contractually responsible," said the administrator. He slid one last piece of paper to Derek. "This release will need to be signed by his legal guardian before the Project will certify training."

"He doesn't have-" Derek broke off as Sheppard took the form from him and passed it to McKay.

"We'll take care of it," he said. The Admin Suit looked to McKay for confirmation and accepted his nod as validation of Sheppard's promise. The papers were collected and put in files, and the men in suits and the Air Force recruiter left with the same polite, concise platitudes as farewells as they had offered when they walked in.

The door closed behind them and Sheppard still sat in his chair, leaned heavily on the desktop as he glared at the surface.

"Well _that_ sucked," he announced.

"That stuff wasn't in the book Colonel Carter gave me," Derek said, agreeing quietly. "And that last one wasn't the form Blair showed me this morning."

"Shit," said Sheppard. He put his face in his hands and just kind of stayed there for a minute.

"What time is it?" he asked, random but still angry.

"Lunchtime," said Rodney.

"Damn," said Sheppard. "Too early to get shitfaced."

"You're still under medical-"

"Carson can buy the fuckin' alcohol then," Sheppard replied, snappish. Rodney reached out and caught John's hand under his just to try to ground him. It worked enough to get Sheppard pushing away from the desk, anyway. The damage was done, and they had no reason to hang around in the corner office of the main building. Sheppard apologized to McKay for it twice before they got back to the kitchen back at the dorm.

"Stop _apologizing_ ," McKay hissed back at him. He still didn't look cozy with the last hour and a half of their lives. "I'm the one who just got a _free house_ out of the deal, for godsakes."

"You touch my car, I kill you," said Sheppard soberly. "I've seen how you drive."

"Remote-controlled vehicles and Jumpers are _hardly_ comparable."

And apparently that was closer to their normal, because the empty death-threat seemed to make McKay relax. Either that or it was the act of searching kitchen cupboards that did the trick.

Sheppard, however, was still a live wire. He pointed Stiles and Derek toward a seat and looked to where Blair Sandburg sat over a plate of something that made Stiles' nose itch from ten feet away. Ellison had sat up and paid attention, too.

"Where is everyone?" Sheppard asked.

"Ronon and Teyla wanted to explore," reported Ellison. "And the doctors all went to the lab."

"What's up?" Blair asked. The man was not oblivious to Sheppard's bad mood.

"Aside from the fact that the kids just got blindsided in there, and McKay just sold his soul to Uncle Sam? Not a whole helluva lot," Sheppard replied. He shrugged. "I'll get over it once I find a bar. In the meantime, I need transportation to Beacon Hills, and I gotta get Carter to arrange it."

"He's _Not_ gonna get over it," Stiles offered as a cautious aside.

Sheppard looked at him sharply, then nodded and pointed vaguely at what he had said. "Probably right. But whatever."

"What the hell -" Blair looked from face to face, with the exception of Rodney, who was keeping his back to the rest of them and very intent on whatever food he had found to prepare.

"It wasn't the paperwork you told me it would be," Derek said. "This was official state and federal documents. Not just Sentinel Project filing."

"No way..." Blair stared. Sheppard nodded.

"And if it's all officially signed and sealed, then we're gonna take the time and get Stilinski's legal guardian to sign off, ASAP. So reschedule whatever was on deck for the day. The second we get a vehicle, me and those two are going to Beacon Hills."

"If they just pulled your license, you can't drive," said Ellison. "Not until you clear certification here. And your senses are still too whacked to risk it."

Sheppard glowered at the table top and strangled the back of the chair he leaned on as best he could around the arm brace.

"Derek can drive," Stiles said. "We can still go."

Sheppard nodded acceptance of it and then stood up. "I'm gonna go talk to Carter."

Rodney looked back at him as he left but he stayed in the kitchen, looking very much like he was avoiding Sheppard. Stiles looked to Derek, reassuring himself at least they were still cool. His friend's response was to shift slightly in his chair, taking a slightly more comfortable lounge and set his arm over the back of Stiles' chair.

There was a sudden clatter as Rodney dropped something on the counter.

"Crap. Can he zone out if he's mad?" he asked, looking back at Ellison. "Do I need to go-"

"He'll sort it out," the Sentinel replied. He reached over to the backpack sitting next to Blair and snagged the radio from it. "Teyla, Ronon... you should probably head back."

"Somebody should warn _Sam_ ," added Blair. He still looked confused and stunned and he shook his head. He looked over at Derek and Stiles. "I'm sorry, guys. I thought it was just our stuff for the Project. I didn't know they were going to... do _that_."

"Yeah. We just... didn't know," Derek said.

"Somebody might have warned me about the citizenship requirement," McKay offered up. "It's fine, you warned us about the rest, _sort of_. But that... I wasn't expecting _that_. I think it... scared John."

"Oh yeah. That'd do it," said Ellison. Blair started pounding his head on his hands over the table.

Stiles slouched a little lower in his chair and used Derek's arm as a pillow. He didn't know exactly what to make of it yet. At least he didn't just dump an entire lifetime of debt on Derek. But he knew enough to realize a lot of doors had just slammed in his face. And he was stuck trusting Derek to help him pry them open when he came up to them.

And he was counting more and more on John Sheppard to get his dad back. The guy couldn't even save his _car_ from _McKay_ if he wanted, but he was the last loophole left to get Stiles' dad away from the Alphas.

*~*~*

Somehow John managed to explain the events of the morning spent in the Administrative offices without raising his voice or throwing anything in the lab. It just took him a minute or so, and it wasn't like Carter and Beckett didn't already know what he had been up against since they found the ProX and reported it back to the SGC. But the annoyance of it, the insult and embarrassment that it carried with it, was something all new to John Sheppard. And it was a raw wound.

"Wait. Can they do that?" Daniel asked at one point. So not _everyone_ knew. But Carson had dropped whatever notes he was making on the genetics lab's data and had to pace.

"They just freaking did, so I sure as hell hope so," replied John.

"Settle," said Carson. He was cautious about it and seemed to expect the glare it earned him, but he held up his hands in peace. "You get your blood up much more, ye zone again. Just... keep your focus, that's all I mean."

"It is kinda the standard, from what I was able to find out. Except the citizenship thing, I'm sure they don't have a lot of those," said Sam. "But... it's bureaucratic CYA, isn't it? They can't send you out there to get hurt after saying they trained you how not to get hurt, and the information you can get your hands on that, say, Daniel or I couldn't... someone has to be responsible for the unknowns. It's checks and balances to keep attention off the Project, and keep the heat off the branch you end up with, all of it."

"I get that. And I. Don't. _Like_ it. Just to be clear," said Sheppard carefully. He was on his best behavior, but he was mad, and he was being honest. Daniel frowned and nodded.

"You don't like it, but you didn't have a lot of choice in the matter," he said, clarifying John’s annoyance. Sheppard let out an unamused laugh and nodded.

"That's one way to put it," he replied. He took a breath and squared his shoulders, trying to shake it off. He had his rant. He was angry. And now he had shit to do. Sheppard looked to Carter.

"Colonel, I need transportation to Beacon Hills," he said, calmer but far from his usual request reports. "Just for the day. I want Stilinski and Hale on my team, and the only way to start that ball rolling is to get his guardians to sign something for the Project, releasing them of responsibility."

"I don't suppose Sandburg would let you borrow his car?" Sam asked, wincing slightly as she clearly knew the answer to her own question.

"I am no longer legally permitted to drive, on or off-base, Colonel," Sheppard explained, with mildly forced patience. "I need room for a driver, McKay, Hale, Stilinski, and Ronon, _and_ Teyla."

"I thought you just had to get a paper signed," said Daniel.

"The man who has to _sign_ it is just _one_ of the men who sent the hunters after Hale and ultimately put my team in the hospital," said Sheppard. "You'll have to go with me on this, but I'm thinking we need some extra precautions, in light of the fact that only one member of my team is legally allowed to _carry weapons_ here, and he's not our best shot."

It was one thing after another but Sheppard was rather proud of himself for not raising his voice. His blood pressure was another matter, however, and he clearly saw Carson giving him the side eye for it.

"We can rent a couple of cars, it's just a few hours north," said Daniel. "I can drive."

Sheppard blinked at the simple solution, and at the cutting reminder that he couldn't even rent a car without McKay's signature on the line. He coughed slightly to clear the static building in his ears. He needed to get gone and run this off.

"All due respect guys, I don't care if we get a clown car with Mo and Curly behind the wheel," he said, exhaustion edging his tone. "I just need this done. And to get back to Atlantis where I can _shoot the damn things_ that want to stomp me. A-SAP."

"Understood, Colonel," replied Carter. She tugged on Daniel's shoulder. "Get them on the road."

*~*~*

While John was gone on a run with Ronon, and Daniel Jackson was off somewhere with Sandburg and Ellison trying to find them rental cars, the Air Force recruiter showed up at the dorm. He was looking for Rodney and found him in the kitchen without anybody telling him where to look. Rodney was concerned that he was far too predictable for a moment before he realized the man carrying the box had a red and black tattoo on his right hand, like half the other military people on the campus. Of course he was a Sentinel.

"Lt. Colonel McKay-"

" _Oh god_ , please _don't_." McKay rolled his eyes at the ceiling. The Air Force Sentinel didn't bother listening to him. He just approached the table and slid the box between Rodney and where Stiles sat, not-drinking more tea.

"Your uniform, sir. ABU fatigues. Officers colors Service dress. And gear," said the Airman. "Regulations are in effect on campus as on base."

Rodney stared at the box, searching for words and instead floundering like a fish. Across from him, Stiles' eyes bugged and he pushed away from the box.

Rodney tried to get the man to take it back. "I... look, we aren't going to be here but another week. I don't have time to get them fit according to regulations... the last thing I need is another _backpack_ -"

"They're fitted, sir. Your information was on file," said the Airman.

"That was two years ago!" Rodney hung his head and tried to figure out how else to dodge it. He just _Didn't Know_ enough about the military to fake his way out of it. Good thing he had lost some extra padding over those two weeks in the mines then, he thought bitterly. He waved it off. "Fine. I'll take care of it."

The man disappeared without fanfare and McKay shoved the box away once he had left. Stiles finally scrounged up the courage to break into the box and McKay waved him at it.

"Knock yourself out," he said. He belatedly realized he was talking to a baby-sentinel and quickly corrected. "No, _don't_ knock anything- stay _conscious_. Please. For the love of god."

Stiles seemed to have gotten the point and poked inside. He found the hat and pins on top, and took them out. "These are different than what Blair was wearing at the reserve," the kid said. "His were tan. Yours are blue and gray."

"Ellison's Army. Sheppard's Air Force. Like he said, ABU, not BDU. _Airman_ battle uniform," said McKay, not looking up from the tablet in his hand. He was desperately trying to work on something familiar and his mind wasn't even focusing on numbers.

"Oh. So are you gonna wear it?"

"And look like an _idiot_?" replied Rodney. He shook his head. "No way."

"You won't look like an idiot. It's a uniform, okay, man? These things are, like, a ninety-nine percent foolproof way to get somebody laid," Stiles informed him. Rodney did raise his eyes then, but only to glare.

"You're seventeen. How would you know?"

"I'm _seventeen_. I _know_."

That did not make Rodney feel any better, but he was also the one who didn't actually go out on a date until he was legally old enough to drink, too. Stiles had just basically married Derek Hale and _wow_ , did Hale win a genetic lottery. The kid probably _did_ know.

Rodney tried again to focus on the equation on the tablet in front of him, but he got hung up on the realization that he had personally signed and initialed an entire sheaf of paper that morning. Sometimes initialling directly over John's to replace his signature or mark. Everything his friend had worked for and trained for and paid for had been _given_ to Rodney, as if he was the one who had earned it.

In some cases, John's signature had been completely removed, in others there was a paper trail. But even if he didn't have keys or know where the house physically existed, Rodney was now legally and financially responsible for it. For someone else's stuff. If the kid and Derek were all but legally married on paper, so were Rodney and John.

Rodney stared at the box. John even had to share his rank and service record. Nothing in that box was Rodney's either. It was earned by Lt. Colonel John Sheppard. And Rodney was now legally responsible for keeping him alive. If for no other reason than he had no interest in owning John's stuff.

"Fuck this," Rodney said under his breath. He tossed his tablet in the open box and stood up. Stiles backed off and just barely got the hat back in the box before Rodney scooped it up and marched up to his room.

The promised uniforms - multiples - were there. And the boots and hat to match. The more familiar black ones and the blues and greys of air force fatigues. They just had patches and pins to worry about. He could figure it out. There was even a regulations manual in the box to make sure he could. Sandburg hadn't kept his uniform up to regs on base and even Rodney had noticed that the day he met him, so there was obviously a little room to get the details wrong until John could point them out. And he would.

The only thing Rodney intentionally didn't assemble correctly on the uniform were the patches on the jacket sleeves. He stuck the Canadian flag from his own jacket on the right shoulder, and thought very hard about putting the Pegasus on the other. In light of the security concerns they already had to deal with, however, he left the American flag on the left instead.

It was around the time he had everything on and the box shoved out of the way in the room's tiny little closet that the door beeped open again. John walked in asking if he was okay, because apparently it wasn't expected that Rodney would have sent himself to his room in the middle of the day when there was a perfectly good kitchen to work from. But John stopped talking when he saw Rodney standing not far away in the ABU dirty blue and grays.

"Oh." John said after a minute. "That's new."

"Uniforms on campus like everybody else," Rodney offered. He held his arms out and shrugged. "The recruiter guy called me Lt. Colonel. I figured... _you_ earned it, so..."

The uniform didn't get Rodney laid, exactly, but it got him stripped and shoved in the shower with a sweaty John Sheppard coming down from a runner's high, which all in all was pretty damn close.

*~*~*


	31. Chapter 31

**Earth: Beacon Hills, California**

The Argents had a nice house and everything, but it was still a place Stiles had never wanted to step foot in again. He would make one final exception to the promise he had made himself to avoid it, then he was done. With all of it. Still, Stiles stared out the rental SUV's window at the front porch and made no move toward the door handle.

Sheppard got out of the front passenger side with a quiet order for them to wait, then Stiles watched as the uniformed Lt. Colonel went to talk to Ellison in the other car. Ellison and Ronon got out of the car, with Ronon sitting himself comfortably on the front bumper like he didn't have a care in the world. He had a really weird looking gun in a holster at his thigh, though, so that probably had something to do with it.

There was a tap-tapping on the window and then Stiles' door opened. Sheppard leaned against the door enough to hang inside and look at everyone in the back of the vehicle.

"Derek, stay in here with Rodney. Keep your head down, because I don't want it shot off. Understood?" he said. Derek didn't seem easy with it but he nodded. Sheppard glanced at Rodney, making sure he was good with it, before looking back to Derek in the third row. "I'm trusting you with mine, so this goes both ways. If something doesn't look right, let Ellison in on it. Me or Stiles should be able to hear anything from in there, you guys just have to keep our exit clear."

The plan seemed easy enough and Derek crouched between the seats to move forward when Stiles was ordered out. Daniel got out, too, and Sheppard ducked in again to toss Rodney the car keys. "Stay here. Just be ready to move."

And then Stiles was more or less escorted to the Argents' front door by two men in military garb, though Daniel had left his jacket in the car and looked much less formal than Sheppard. It was just for show, a blind effort at intimidation so that guns wouldn't be called in against an arms dealer.

The front door opened before they got to it, with Chris Argent waiting to meet them. He saw the bruises still on Stiles' face and neck, and didn't seem happy about it, but he waited until they approached.

"Stiles? You alright?" he asked. Stiles nodded vaguely and Sheppard set a hand on his shoulder.

"Chris Argent?" he asked.

"Yes." The man nodded, sizing up Sheppard in a familiar enough way, trying to figure out if he was human or another kind of threat.

"Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, USAF. I'm here to notify you that Mr. Stilinski has been remanded to the custody of the federal government. And the boy would like to collect his belongings," said Sheppard. There was a smile on his face, but it was forced courtesy.

"What-" The question paused and then Chris waved them inside. "Of course. Everything's where he left it."

Sheppard let his hand up and Stiles bolted up the stairs. He hit his temporary room and, true enough, found everything exactly the mess he had left it in. He started shoving things in his backpack, starting with his laptop from home. There was nothing but school stuff on the better one the Argents had given him, so he left it there. He found his jackets and his shoes and his extra stuff and crammed things messily into where it could fit in his small suitcase. He was just trying to stuff his pillow in and still close it when he was tackled from the side in a full-body hug. The wind was knocked right out of him and his stuff sprawled off the bed. " _Ohmygod_!"

"Stiles!" It was Lydia's voice, in a very high-pitched squeal, and her arms had snaked around his ribs to remind him of more bruises that hadn't quite disappeared yet, _and_ a burn. _No touching, touching hurt, ow ow ow..._

"Lydi-ow _owow_..." Stiles was forced to actually extract himself from the hug in order to try talking.

"Are you okay? What happened? What's wrong?" came the interrogation, and Stiles wasn't sure where to even start. He glanced up and saw Allison lurking in the short hall to the door.

"I got my ass kicked by hunters after the blow up at the loft," he said, trying to keep it simple.

"They were supposed to bring you home," said Allison, frowning at the news. Stiles flipped up the hem of his shirt to show the burn from the cattle prod still healing at his ribs.

"They didn't seem that invested in my safety," he replied. Lydia hung back, looking between her two friends and chewing on her lip.

"Where are you going now?" Allison asked. Stiles pointed vaguely toward the stairs and the men he knew were there somewhere watching out for him.

"Joined the Air Force. Getting the hell away from here," he said.

"You aren't serious," said Lydia. She sounded offended as much as anything. It wasn't exactly the truth, but he was serious.

"Please stop yelling," Stiles managed.

"I'm _not_ yelling," replied Lydia. "I just... you're _leaving_?"

"What about your dad?" Allison asked. Stiles straightened up and had to back off a step.

"What about him?" he asked, cautious.

"He's alive, Stiles. We all saw him. Deucalion has him," said Allison "There's been a total shutdown on everything, everyone's looking for him."

"Tell me where to find him then," said Stiles. "Is he here? Downstairs?"

"No-"

"Then what am _I_ supposed to do about it?" Stiles asked. "Stay here? Get beat up by both sides of this? I'm _human_ , and I can't. Not alone."

Lydia tucked her arms around herself again and Stiles wanted to apologize. But he hadn't exactly said anything wrong. He was frustrated suddenly, listening to Lydia panic and Allison get angry.

"Whatever the Alphas did, it screwed _me_ up," he finally said. "It's made my hearing all wrong, everything is always bright, even at night. And it's getting worse, not better. I gotta figure _me_ out. These guys are how I can fix it. And maybe help my dad. I just gotta find him."

" _Are_ you human?" The predictable question shouldn't have been a threat because Stiles had asked the same thing about Ellison and Sheppard when Derek told him. Except this one came from Allison, and he knew she was pretty much fine with the monster-traps and jail cells her family kept locking their friends up in.

" _Yes_ , I'm human! I can just... see and hear really, really good, and I have a permanent headache that I'm still getting used to," he said. "So no, no need to sic more hunters on me."

"Stiles, stop!" Allison replied, sounding at least a little distressed by his annoyance. "We were really worried about you, and the guys who came back said you'd been taken by the Sunrise Patriots, okay? And then that Kincaid guy from the Patriots showed up _himself_ to say they don't have you. No one could find you."

Stiles hesitated to argue about that. It sounded important. And bad. He didn't want nationalist terrorists looking for him, any more than he wanted normal hunters looking for him. He needed to tell Sheppard. Stiles returned to shoving things back in his suitcase.

"I didn't want found. That was the whole point," he said, punching his pillow into a corner of the big bag. "Everybody else has someone to help them with this mess. Me and mine keep getting _taken out_. So I'll be back when I can survive and don't have a target on my _face_."

"We were trying to _help_..." said Allison.

"Yeah? I got a lightsaber to the ribs. Some _help_ ," replied Stiles. He finally beat the last fight with the zipper and his stuff was packed. That was a relief. He swung his backpack on and looked at her, listening to her heartbeat. "Besides, what was the plan if I'd come back here? Huh? Now _Gerard_ knows what happened to my dad, what was gonna happen to _me_?"

Allison hugged her arms around her ribs and looked away. Lydia looked from Stiles to Allison and saw the evade.

"Allison? What?" Lydia pressed, her voice up again. Stiles winced. He sighed, waved half-heartedly toward the half-closed door Allison blocked.

"Come on. The only reason I made it up _here_ when I walked through that door is because I brought friends," Stiles said, not at all gloating about it. "Otherwise, if I had shown up on my own, I'd be locked up in the basement _again_ until Gerard figured out how to bait the Alphas again, like they did for two weeks."

"No, that's not-"

"Don't lie, Allison, I can freaking hear it," said Stiles, tired of it. "So I'm removing myself from the board. Forfeit the piece to gravity, guys. I'm not playing."

"What about your dad?" Allison asked again.

"Got any leads on the Alphas? I'd _love_ to go talk to my dad, you don't _even_ know," Stiles said, arms out.

Allison shrugged and shook her head. "They took over a warehouse somewhere we think. We don't know."

"What about Derek's place? Or the bank?"

"We cleared the bank two weeks ago," replied Allison. Lydia nodded.

"So did Scott and Derek," she added. That figured. Stiles rolled his eyes.

"I _know_ about the bank because _I_ was in it," he told them. "So the Alphas are good at hiding things in plain sight."

"Stilinski, you ready?" The girls looked up, startled to see Colonel Sheppard pushing at the door. Stiles had heard the boots on the stairs when Lydia pounced on him, but figured the Colonel had gone back down when he hadn't interrupted. He was just watching Stiles' back like he had promised Derek. It was enough of an excuse for Stiles. He grabbed his suitcase and started for the door. Sheppard met up with Daniel on the stairs to lead the way back down.

"Gotta go," he said. Lydia looked from Allison to Stiles before latching on to Stiles' hand. She didn't stop him though, just went with him. It made it all hurt worse because Stiles missed his friends. He just couldn't be certain anymore which of his friends missed him.

*~*~*

"I think I know where the Alphas might be."

The announcement from the back seat as the door slammed shut wasn't entirely unwelcome, but the noise level was. John rubbed at his ears and cast a glare back at his youngest teammate. Stiles sunk in his chair but didn't apologize.

"Where?"

"The bank. Apparently everyone checked there while I was missing, but I never left it," said Stiles. "So somehow, they're hiding in it, or something. The pack should have picked me up but I guess nobody did."

"There was nothing there," Derek confirmed. "No sign of you at all. Even if they can disguise their scent, there is no way they could hide _yours_ for two weeks."

"Well, they must have," replied Stiles. "I will _show_ you where I was. For _two weeks_."

"Sounds like as good a place as any to start with," Sheppard decided. He glanced back at Derek. "You know where this place is?" At Derek's nod, he waved to the driver's seat that Daniel hadn't climbed into yet as he fought with his jacket. "You drive then. Give Dr. Jackson a break."

Derek didn't wait to be told twice. He climbed over Stiles to get out the door and Stiles claimed his third row seat so Daniel didn't have to. Behind John, Rodney started relaying information out loud and John turned in his seat to see who the hell Rodney was talking to. Rodney turned his head enough to show the earwig comms mic that Sheppard had missed so much over the last month and a half.

"Where the hell did you get that?" he demanded. McKay switched it off and sat back so Sheppard couldn't steal it from him.

"Sam. It's relayed through the Daedalus so we don't lose contact," he said.

"And why couldn't we have had them the _whole time?_ "

"Not all of us. Just me, and Daniel, and Blair, and-Teyla-and-Ronon..."

“Really?” Sheppard asked. “You had to take the long way around on that one?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to just come out and say that you and Ellison still aren’t allowed to have them,” replied Rodney, indignant until he realized that he had just come out and said it. He shrugged it off and added to it. “Neither can Stiles. _There_ , happy?”

Sheppard rolled his eyes and started to face front again but Daniel caught his attention. “Colonel, I thought we came up here to have his guardian sign off on the Project?”

“That’s why we’re up here,” Sheppard confirmed. Daniel nodded, but he still looked confused and irritated.

“Then, correct me if I’m wrong, but... why didn’t you have his guardian sign the form while we were standing in their _living room?_ ” he asked.

“Because that wasn’t his guardian,” said Sheppard. “That was the asshole who put my team in the hospital, a shitty foster parent, at _best_.”

Daniel waited and didn’t apparently hear an answer he liked. “I don’t follow.”

“A child’s legal guardian is their parent, until that is severed by death or the courts,” Sheppard replied. “And it just so happens, neither of those happen to be the case in this situation. So we go to the guardian. We find his dad.”

“Excuse me? Sam looked-”

“I’ve now heard from three different people that Noah Stilinski is alive,” interrupted Sheppard. “That’s more than a coincidence and good enough for a follow-up. If we can’t find him, fine, we take the form to the state and Colonel Carter makes a social worker sign off on it. Simple. But _if_ his dad’s alive, we try him first.”

“So where’s his dad supposed to be?” asked Daniel. Sheppard winced and looked forward out the window. Daniel wasn’t going to like the answer to that one either.

“With the Alphas? At last report.”

“Oh my _god_ , are you _kidding_ -”

“You’re armed, right?” Sheppard glanced back at Daniel and received a glare for it. “We’ve got anti-werewolf bullets. As long as you can carry a gun.”

“ _That_ is not making me feel better,” Daniel replied. Sheppard nodded and made an effort to cut back on the sass after that. A few werewolves couldn’t be worse than anything else they had dealt with in their combined off-world experiences. It just would have been nice to have had a few P-90s backing the play, and Sheppard was going to be bitter about that for a good long time.

The promised bank looked pretty fancy for such an obviously closed up building. Derek was so certain of the dead-end lead that he parked in the empty parking lot to the side of the bank, and Sandburg pulled in next to them. Ronon unfolded from the backseat of the other vehicle and was already scanning the street beyond the lot when Sheppard stepped out.

“What’s up?” Sheppard asked, seeing the tension in his second. Ronon nodded off toward the street, and a small, older BMW that parked across from the bank.

“We were followed,” Ronon said. Sheppard saw the redheaded teenager pop out of the car and head their way. _Shit_.

“Stiles...” Sheppard said, tugging the back door open to let McKay out and get Stiles moving faster. “Your friend didn’t go home...”

Rodney hurried out of the way and Stiles followed, spotting the young woman walking briskly toward them.

“Lydia, what are you doing?” Stiles asked, moving on an intercept course to shoo the girl back to her car. Derek stepped up alongside him and the pair made a good block for the rest of the team.

“What are _you_ doing?” Lydia insisted. “This is crazy, Stiles! Just go back and we can help Scott _, all of us_ this time, and it’ll work. Scott just needs you. _And_ Derek. The pack isn't strong enough. This has been going on for months...”

“Yeah, well, I need Derek more. And I need my dad,” said Stiles. “Go home, Lydia.”

"No, I don't want to," said Lydia. She was a prim and sassy little thing and Sheppard shook his head. Stiles liked playing out of his league, because he flailed and looked to Derek as if the werewolf would solve it. Judging from the look on the girl's face, Derek wasn't going to have any luck either.

"Stiles, leave it," said Sheppard. "Let's look around. She can do what she wants."

That caught the attention of the redhead and she caught hold of Stiles' shirt by the front and dragged him over to Sheppard.

"Who are you that you can order my friends around?" Lydia wanted to know. And Stiles behind her rolled his eyes as the girl just steamrolled his effort at explaining. "No, Stiles. You _don't_ leave. This isn't _you_."

"Miss, Lydia, is it?" Sheppard said, smiling despite himself. It wasn't the time, or the place, but it was mildly hilarious to witness all the same. "We need to get some paperwork to Sheriff Stilinski. And we don't have a lot of time to get it done. So the Q and A interrogation you're looking to run on your friends needs to wait."

The girl blinked at him. "That's not _actually_ possible. Nobody knows where he is."

"Exactly, which is why we don't have the time for Stiles to explain all this to you _right now._ I promise you, he'll send you an _email_ ," said Sheppard. Stiles started nodding his head in approval of that idea.

"Email is good," he said. And Sheppard somehow expected that Derek would be the one to write it. Lydia squinted between the three of them.

"He's not disappearing?" she asked.

"No ma'am," replied Sheppard. He had snooped on the conversation at the Argents and tried to play along with Stiles' half-truth. "Just borrowing him for... boot camp."

Lydia still had her tiny fist full of Stiles' shirt, but she looked less likely to riot. "Fine. But I can go with him now."

"Lydia, don't start," said Derek, but she shot him a fiery-eyed glare and he quieted, hands up. He looked at Sheppard and shrugged his shoulders as he gave up. Sheppard looked to Stiles. He was the only one who had any idea what they were walking into. And the girls had seemed pretty savvy when they had cornered Stiles at the Argents' place.

"Your call," he said. He moved to the back of Sandburg's rental to sort out the weapons they had to work with. Ellison had borrowed a limited selection from the armory in the Sentinel Project's gun range. And Daniel looked over his shoulder and very definitely did not approve. But Daniel had his own weapon on him, so Sheppard wasn't going to worry about it too much.

Sheppard stuck with one of the semi-auto Glocks Ellison had stolen from the hunters and Rodney did alright with handguns so he made sure his Guide had one in his shiny new uniform holster. (It was going to take getting used to, but John was warming to the look.) And he let Teyla find one she was comfortable with, since they didn't have the option of their preferred automatics. He called Derek over and checked if he wanted the last weapon in their stash but the kid shook his head. Sheppard shut the trunk and looked the young man in the eye.

"So I'm assuming you can handle yourself if anything comes up. Anything you think I need to know about?" he asked quietly.

Derek looked over at where Stiles was still arguing with Lydia about his life choices. Then back at Sheppard. "If I... start to act weird? Shoot me with wolfsbane and get me out of there. But I should be able to handle it."

"And there was nothing here before?" Sheppard asked. Derek shook his head.

"Nothing. I checked it. They had been there, but they had moved on. It was empty when we found it," said Derek.

"Alright. We'll try it," said Sheppard. They were playing cat-and-mouse with werewolves, none of them qualified to actually fight the unknowns they were looking for, and they didn't even know where to start looking. It was kind of like hunting Wraith, and the only real way to draw them out was to use the team as bait. And Sheppard was just enough _done_ with the last few days of Earth politics that he didn't mind the trouble it invited.

"Alright. Stiles, you and your cling-on stick with me," Sheppard announced. "Ellison, Teyla, and Ronon keep our way out clear. Guides and Daniel... stay close and out of trouble, please."

Stiles showed up to lead the way, with Lydia clinging to his shirt possessively. Sheppard glanced back at Ellison and saw the Sentinel tap his ear, a hint to start the search with his hearing. If Derek and his pack had been relying on scent, it tracked that they couldn't trust their noses. Stiles let the way to the door he knew, and to no surprise discovered it was boarded up and yet not locked. The dead bank could be a homeless camp inside and _that_ would be awkward.

It was dark and open inside, with a skylight on the roof mostly still intact and doing the job of diffusing light across the first floor. The second floor was tucked away on the edges, an open level that had once had marble posts and glass walls to keep people from falling blindly off the edges. Now it offered a dead-drop about twelve feet to a marble floor. And Stiles led the way to the stairs.

Sheppard's nose twitched at a sour, bitter smell as he ducked through the door. It was a mix of dust (Rodney's voice in his head offered up a reminder that he hated _rock dust_ ) and something caustic like ammonia, but softer. Easier to overlook. And coffee, inexplicably. Ellison sneezed behind him and Sheppard cast a glance back at him. At the automatic reaction for Jim, Blair was wide eyed and looked around on alert.

"What the hell is that?" Sheppard asked Ellison.

"No idea. Turn it down," came the order. Sheppard nodded acknowledgment and followed Stiles up the stairs. He caught Rodney’s hand and set it on his arm at his shoulder as a hint to keep in John’s shadow. The dials worked, mostly, but the smell was stronger upstairs. Stiles coughed at it but didn't seem to register what had hit the older two. Sheppard caught his shoulder to hold him up. "Do you smell anything here?"

Stiles coughed again but shook his head. He looked pale and nervous and John saw the signs. The kid knew this place.

"I don't smell anything," said Stiles. He looked to Derek and pointed toward one of the hallways. "Did you guys check back there? It was, like, a janitor closet or something."

Blair caught up and saw the response. "He acclimated to it here," said the Guide. "He was in it too long to notice now."

Sheppard looked to Ronon and Teyla. "Hold the stairs. Yell if you see anything."

Then he, Rodney, and Daniel followed after the kids. Ellison and Sandburg teamed up and started clearing the rooms along the way since Stiles wasn't trained to worry about the dangers of closed doors in hallways. They were going to have to work on that.

Stiles found the room he was looking for and pointed it out from five feet away, not at all interested in going closer. "There," was all he had to say about it. It was darker along the hallways as it was further from the skylight over the lobby and Lydia complained she couldn't see, but Sheppard could. Derek apparently did alright with the available lighting, too, because they both poked their head in.

Even with his sense of smell turned almost all the way down, John could tell the room had been turned into a cell for some time. He had seen them before, it wasn't terribly original. Just some messed up blankets and stacks of discarded food packages and water bottles. The inside of the door was all kicked to hell, but the kid was no match for a fire door. He had scratched it up at the bottom with a chunk of broken concrete it looked like. The small room reeked of unhealthy and Sheppard moved to close the door once he was sure the room was empty.

"He was definitely here," he reported. Derek looked slightly shell-shocked as he nodded his agreement. Sheppard dug into his pants pocket and pulled out a small flashlight.

"Watch your eyes," he warned. Ellison looked away but Stiles wasn't paying attention. Sheppard cast the light down the hall and away from those with sharper senses, handed it off to Daniel. "Stab me or him in the eye with that thing, you might get shot. Fair warning," he said. "You and Derek clear the hall on that side. Look for safes, access panels, whatever. I'm thinking false walls."

Suddenly there was a shout from the lobby area. "Colonel!"

Daniel thankfully had the presence of mind to kill the flashlight before the group turned back to see what Teyla was warning them about. Sheppard had jacked up his hearing to keep his sense of smell down, and there was a lot of noise for a moment. He heard quickly what had Ronon's attention, down on the lobby floor.

Someone had come in through the front and running boots echoed on marble. Rodney caught Sheppard by the elbow and forcefully pulled him back to keep him from their team at the edge. John looked back to see Rodney staring down at the LSD screen.

The device didn't have the layout of the building, so there was no way to discern between the first floor and the second, but it still managed to paint a pretty clear picture. Three dots in the center of the room, where Ronon and Teyla would have no trouble seeing, but six more scattered under the balcony along the edges of the lobby.

Sheppard caught the edge of the LSD, curious to see if he could get the friendly tech to give him more useful info. The dots changed colors, letting him more easily discern between his team and the new guys. He muttered a quiet thanks, though to Rodney or the LSD for the upgrade he wasn't exactly clear on. Then he moved up alongside Ronon to see what they had to work with.

"Who the hell are you?" came the strange demand from one of the three men in the middle of the lobby. "Where's Ellison and Sandburg?"

The question took Sheppard by surprise, certainly, but he shrugged it off. The man doing the demanding was older than him, probably about Jim's age, with a military bearing despite the fact that he was short. He didn't look or sound very friendly.

" _Shit. Garrett Kincaid,_ " whispered Blair. He and Jim had hung back at the hallway when Jim had heard the footsteps, and Ellison blocked Blair behind him, protective. So, not a friendly then, certainly. He could see weapons in the hands of the men who flanked Kincaid, and he didn't have a clue who the man was.

"Kincaid, you old so-and-so, don't you have better things to be doing with your time?" he called down to the man. Sheppard could bullshit if it bought them time.

"Plenty," the man called back. "So stop wasting it and answer my question."

"Not terribly inclined to. You're interrupting. Go away," said Sheppard. Kincaid took a step toward the stairs and Sheppard raised his weapon in warning.

"Ronon, don't let anybody on the stairs," Sheppard ordered. Ronon obliged by priming his weapon. There was a pause, and Kincaid had moved no more than one step. He stood with his hands behind his back, head tilted. Sheppard could see clear as day, but Kincaid squinted, half blind from the glare from the skylight.

"Williams," he heard Kincaid order quietly. "I want those stairs."

The man to Kincaid's left hesitated before following orders and charging up the stairs with his weapon raised. Ronon just couldn't wait to pull the trigger and the man was stunned by the second step. He collapsed back to the marble and was going to have one nasty headache when he woke up.

"Look, man, we can go all night on this," said Sheppard, not at all daunted by the enemy's failed approach. "And we have the high ground. So take your men and go home."

"I don't think so," said Kincaid. "I'm still waiting on Nature Boy and his Sentinel to show their cowardly faces and get back where they belong."

"Excuse me?" Sheppard replied. "You want something, speak plain English."

"Ellison!" Kincaid shouted. John stepped back toward Rodney as he tried to get his ears to stop ringing, desperately trying to wrangle the dials as Kincaid shouted again and his men joined in like a pack of mad dogs. The man was a one-man loony bin set on _Random_ , and Sheppard flinched as his ears stabbed his brain with the echoes of the crew’s noises off the marble walls and floors.

Stiles stood a few feet away, half hunched over with his arms over his head and Derek and Lydia both trying to help shield him from something they couldn’t see. Sheppard risked looking over at Ellison, but the Sentinel was still orienting against the noise Kincaid was letting loose.

"Come on, _Ellison_! Where's the freak show, huh? You left your post! You put yourself back in my business! You asked for this!" Kincaid kept it up, a loud and forceful, tiring taunt that hurt like hell.

Rodney had set a very careful hand to John's back and the kick to his system that ordinarily buckled his knee instead moved the dials to control the sound focus. John listened for Rodney instead and let the yelling become background blur.

The problem was that, when listening to the subtle background sounds instead of those right in front of them, he could hear the background sounds coming from _above_ them. Heartbeats. Footfalls. Quiet whistles. They didn't have the high ground after all. Sheppard looked to the skylights edge, looking for the attack that couldn't be far off.

*~*~*


	32. Chapter 32

The noise in the room was deafening to Rodney and he winced and struggled through it. John had stopped flinching and stood stone still in front of him. A couple tries to get any reaction at all failed and John swayed where he leaned against him.

"Shit!" Rodney braced to pull John back away from the stairs and had to drag him to the dirty glass and shattered stone that littered the floor. Ronon looked back at him and Rodney pointed toward the noisemakers in the lobby. "Shut them up!"

Ronon had only been waiting for the order and he didn't need to be told twice. He took aim at someone, Rodney couldn't see who, and the crazy howling chaos from downstairs turned into return fire instead. Teyla and Ronon knew how to handle themselves after that and Rodney focused on trying to get Sheppard conscious and moving again. Derek left Stiles with Lydia to help drag him back into the shadows of the hallway near the others. Stiles was conscious but he kept rubbing at his ears like he couldn't hear at all.

By then, Ellison had gotten his senses to cooperate and moved out to help Teyla and Ronon hold off the stairs, the three of them angling across the balconies, behind the marble-covered supports, to keep Kincaid's team pinned down.

"Ellison!" shouted Kincaid. The shooting stopped. Half pinned supporting John, Rodney couldn't see anything other than his three teammates, alert and at the ready.

"Right here, Kincaid." Ellison replied much quieter, but the man sounded angry in contrast to Kincaid's _happy_.

"I can see that. You aren't supposed to be out of your box, boy. That Freakshow Project of yours is your safe zone. You broke the rules," said Kincaid. Rodney looked over as Blair crouched against the wall to keep someone with a gun between the stairs and the two downed Sentinel.

"What the hell is he on about?" Rodney hissed, trying to stay quiet. Blair shook his head.

"No idea, man. He's a _nutjob_."

"What rules would those be?" Jim called down to the nutjob. Wasn't it a better idea to _ignore_ the crazy until it _went away_? Rodney, frustrated, tried to divert his attention to dragging Sheppard back. But he didn't quite think it was the appropriate place or time to try the kissing thing. Blair moved over to check on him.

"He probably went out on sound or sight, so try to trigger one of the others," Sandburg whispered. Rodney happened to know a good way to short-circuit John on touch, as it happened, and he tugged at the man's shirt to get at that one spot on his ribs that John was so protective of.

Downstairs, the crazy man carried on ranting at Ellison. "Glass said he'd keep you idiots busy and out of my way. And I thought the new Director would work out alright, too, until some jerk in an army rangers getup decides to frame up my operations for a messy little murder... that's not gonna work out, Ellison. I can't have that."

"What the hell?" squawked Blair. At the same time, John finally came around, coughing and struggling, and Rodney ignored the others to get him calmed down and not running into action before he even knew where the action was. Rodney had to pin him in place for a minute, but John settled.

"Don't _do_ that," Rodney whispered at him. "Turn it down-"

"Everything _was_ down! I just fucked up," John replied. He tapped at Rodney's arm over his ribs, trying to get the hint across that he needed to get up. "They're on the roof. Get the kids and find an emergency exit."

Rodney let him up and moved to start getting the others out. Blair had heard, too, and started helping Stiles and Lydia, while Rodney told Daniel what Sheppard had warned. Daniel held up the flashlight and Rodney nodded, pointing for him to lead the way.

Whatever Ellison was saying to Kincaid didn't seem to be working. The man was still yelling from the lobby as John got up to Ellison's shoulder to point out the problem on the roof. At least yelling wasn't shooting.

"True Patriots don't go after their own, Ellison! The General was your shield and those days are done!"

Whatever was going on didn't sound good. And Daniel and his flashlight were not finding the emergency exit fast enough. Rodney looked back to see Sheppard take aim at the skylight, sending it shattering down over the lobby, rather than let Kincaid keep yelling.

Teyla and Ronon took advantage of the distraction to retreat to the shadows and joined up with Ellison and Sheppard again. Daniel dodged down another hallway with his flashlight. This one had better luck and the light was soon waving to catch Rodney's attention. Daniel's voice came over the comm at his ear.

"Found the stairs!"

Rodney saw Blair herding the kids toward Daniel and moved to get John's attention. He didn't have a radio to know they could retreat. The others were aiming the random shot, trying to keep Kincaid's men pinned and away from the main stairs. But there was only so much they could be expected to do with crazy.

*~*~*

Stiles couldn't hear. At all. Nothing. Zip. There had been so much noise and then something seemed to _pop_! in his head and it was silence. That couldn't be a good thing. But it eased up on the pressure in his head and the tension in his back and chest and he could stand up again. He just couldn't hear.

No big deal, right?

Stiles very definitely remembered seeing Sheppard zoned out twice in one day, so if not being able to hear a damn thing was the alternative to a zone out, he would take it. He could still feel every time Lydia dragged at his arm, or his shirt, or Derek hovered against his shoulder, and he could still see and move. Whatever the no-hearing thing was, it at least wasn't a zone out.

Stiles followed Derek out to the cars, and Derek still had the keys. But Lydia yanked on Stiles' arm to get his attention when they tried to get in the cars. He hung back and looked where she pointed. The tires were slashed. And they were not slashed by knives, unless someone had Wolverine's claws as a knife. The cars could drive if they had to, but they couldn’t outrun a werewolf.

That was not good. Stiles still couldn't hear anything, but he looked to Derek. The both of them looked back to the building they had just left and the locked emergency door they wouldn't be able to get back into. Stiles realized that Daniel hadn't stayed with them when they left. He caught Derek's jacket and tried to tell him, to ask where the one adult with the gun had gone, but he could only feel the vibrations in his throat as he tried to talk, not hear it, and he probably shouldn't be yelling and drawing attention. But they had definitely just left people who didn't know werewolves locked in a building with terrorists and Alphas.

Stiles looked around the parking lot again. He could still see. If the Alphas were around, there had to be some sign of them. He saw a shadow move behind the protected exit they had run from and started back toward it. He saw a hooded jacket. As he ran back across the lot, the silence in his ears turned slightly static, and he could hear his own breathing.

He rounded the corner into the walled-off loading area around the door and saw the shadow at the back, blocking the door. It was his dad. Stiles had cornered his dad. He could definitely hear again, because he heard Derek not far behind him, recognized his heartbeat and his breathing. Stiles had backup if he needed it. So he ran down the few steps to the lowered space and right up to hug his dad's neck.

His dad hugged his shoulders and caught the back of his head to tug him closer. Neither of them were able to breathe properly just then, but he swore his dad stopped breathing entirely when he pressed a kiss to Stiles' forehead and just held them still. There was a strange, bitter smell teasing at Stiles' nose suddenly and he pulled back to try to tug his dad out of the bricked-in loading area with its piles of trash and God knew what else stinking up the place.

"Come on, let's go-" said Stiles. His dad moved a step and then stopped. Stiles stared. "Dad, come on! I got us a way out!"

Noah shook his head. "Good. _Take it_ , Stiles. Go."

Stiles grabbed at his dad's arm. He really was stronger, with the annoying solid, dead weight of supernatural muscles pulling back on him. "It's for all of us-"

"Not for me, son. I can't go back, so you get out. Before they drag you in, too," said his dad.

"Sheriff!" Derek tried, catching Noah's attention with the old title. That was Stiles' dad's whole life, and now he flinched from the name. Derek trotted down the steps to try to stay quiet, and a wide-eyed Lydia lurked at the end of the loading bay, looking around distrustfully.

"Look, Sheriff, we need you with us to get him out. Stiles is a Sentinel, he needs training before it screws him up. But he's not old enough-"

"I can't help with that," said Noah. "I can't go anywhere near law enforcement, or- or military, or anything-"

"This one you can! The Colonel will let you!" Stiles insisted. Derek nodded.

"It'll work, Sheriff..."

Noah's eyes flashed yellow and Stiles stumbled back, not used to it. "No. It won't."

"Dad!"

"Stiles! No!" His dad was just barely not growling and Derek put a hand to Stiles' chest to make him back off.

"Okay, we get it," he said carefully. Stiles stared at Derek, a flash of anger for the blatant betrayal. _No_ , they did _not_ get it. But Derek held him back, kept his attention on Noah. His eyes glowed blue at the challenge from the sheriff’s yellow, but Derek wasn't picking a fight.

"You can stay with the Alphas and still help Stiles then. Just sign this and they'll let him in," Derek said, holding out a piece of paper folded up a few too many times, all creased and rumpled from sitting on the dashboard of the rental for the last few hours. A pen was still tucked in the folds from when Sheppard had been throwing it around. Noah seemed to calm down, almost visibly changing back into his dad as he snatched the paper from Derek.

This was _not_ how Stiles wanted it to go. "Dad! Come with us! I need you to go with us, _now_!"

" _Grow up_ , Stiles," his dad shot back. Stiles stepped back, surprised. His dad signed the paper on the door they were all locked out of, and then shoved the form at Derek. "You can't fix this. Otherwise Scott would still be Scott. If there was some magical cure, none of us would be here. You understand? This is it now."

"Doesn't have to be," Stiles insisted.

"It is," said his dad. "And if you stay, it will get worse. If you stay, I can't protect you. Derek can't. Scott can't. And the hunters will take you down if one of us don't have to _first_. Will you let that sink in, son?"

Stiles hung back, but his dad caught his shoulders and shook, carefully but enough to demand attention. "I need you to go. _Away_. As far away as possible. Just... _go_. Because I can't have my boy's blood on my hands, for all this. I love you, and I need you to be _safe_ , damnit! I can figure this shit out, Stiles. But _you_ can't help me."

Stiles stared at him, telling himself he wasn't hearing the staticky words that he knew he was really hearing. His dad caught him in another hug before pushing him away, toward Derek. His eyes flashed a warning yellow as he looked to Derek.

"Get him away from here. And stay out of Beacon Hills," he said. Derek caught Stiles by the arm and pulled him toward the steps back up to the parking lot. Stiles was about to argue again, but his dad's eyes glowed and the man unleashed a werewolf rage on the metal security door. It had no handle or knob to open it with, and Noah punched a hole through the core to let himself reach in and open the door. Stiles dove back up the steps, dodging behind Derek in case something went flying. Nothing did. His dad just disappeared through the door that he shouldn't have been able to open. Like a werewolf.

Stiles stumbled at the top and Lydia caught him. "My car," she said. "We can take my car-"

"But Sheppard..." The clusterfuck of the situation hit him then. His only way out of the werewolf mess was now _locked in_ with the _werewolves_ , and based on the noises Stiles could clearly hear happening inside, Sheppard and his team were locked in _and_ running out of ammunition.

Stiles caught at Derek's jacket and dragged him along, a new stupid idea already piecing itself together in his head.

*~*~*

Ellison trading taunts with Kincaid was cheaper than bullets and Sheppard didn't have any complaints as long as it bought a little extra time for Daniel and the kids to get out. The terrorists weren't the bad guys they had come in for and they were limited on available ammo for werewolves.

"Oh crap," said Rodney at Sheppard's shoulder suddenly. Already overloaded tracking the noise and movement in the room, John looked over at him as Rodney squinted to hear the comm in his ear. "Daniel can't get out. He's on his way back-"

That was trouble. Sheppard turned his attention back to the skylight. There was a second wave of attack just above them and he didn't know what the hell they were waiting for, but he didn't want to have to worry about the kids when it hit.

Daniel showed up a moment later. Sheppard did a double-take at the noticeable shortage of teenagers.

"Where's Stiles and Derek?" Sheppard asked.

"I got them out, waited back for you, and then the door wouldn't open. It's jammed on the outside."

"What the-" That didn't sound right. What the hell happened to the kids on the other side?

The question was shoved out of mind when the terrorists' backup finally got tired of waiting. A single new player dropped in from the broken window in the ceiling. The flying free fall and tumble onto the second floor edge of the bank lobby made Sheppard reconsider the problem. An arrogant control freak like Kincaid wasn't the type to train his men in parkour, let alone allow his minions to break uniform codes.

Shepppard backed up into Rodney, a hand on Teyla's shoulder to make sure his team got the message to retreat. "Fall back. Stairwell, Jackson! Now!"

They dropped back to the shadows quickly but Sheppard knew the shadows wouldn't be enough. They could contain the environment in the stairwell, and maybe Rodney could use his big brain to figure out the door problem. From the first floor of the lobby, random shots rang out as Kincaid's men tried to fire on the dark-clad humanoids dropping one by one into their little fish bowl.

The swooping gymnasts were the werewolves. The bad ones. With unnatural glowing red eyes and grotesque faces that played havoc with Sheppard's senses. He probably should have had Derek draw them a picture or something rather than have assumed they would look like Hale. As far as Sheppard had seen, Hale didn't walk around with claws and a dislocated jaw filled with fangs. Would have been good to know _ahead of time_.

Ronon fired off a stun shot as they moved to the stairwell and the werewolf went down, trembling and seizing. Ellison followed up with a handy werewolf bullet that sounded like it hit something vital to someone. Daniel held the door open and Sheppard herded Rodney in with Teyla and Ronon taking point, Ellison and Sandburg in between, and Sheppard and Jackson to bring up the rear.

There was a strange, bitter smell in the stairwell but Sheppard didn't know what to make of it. It didn't smell like the blend of chemicals the Alphas used to mask everything, but rather a harsher, smaller scent on something in the room, more organic but he didn't know it. It stung his nose and he wanted away from it.

"Door's busted," Ronon reported from two landings down.

"Blast it?" Sheppard called down, ducking his head over the rail to see. He didn't hear a response from Ronan, only Rodney saying "This one."

Then there was a sudden noise at his shoulder as Daniel Jackson let out a shout and seemed to fall towards him.

It was pitch black with the door closed until Daniel turned on a flashlight in his flailing. It stabbed Sheppard in the eyes and he clung to the stair railing as he tried to adjust.

"Werewolf!" Daniel managed to make a coherent word and got the flashlight pointed up and over himself to reflect off the distorted face of a monster standing behind him on the top landing. The rough claws were very definitely wrapped around Daniel's neck and held him in place as a good shield.

"Oh shit. Daniel..." Sheppard had his weapon raised in a nice square off but he was too far down the stairwell already. He didn't have the angle, and the two men were about evenly matched for size, but the way Daniel stood on the balls of his feet a step below the werewolf indicated maybe they weren't matched for strength.

"Down the stairs," the creature ordered. It could talk, and Sheppard had to remind himself that it had to be some kind of human, because Derek Hale was human. But the thing holding Daniel looked nothing like the four-legged wolf-dog that Rodney had seen. This had a hairy face, maybe, but just around the edges, and a massive forehead over sunken eyes and a jaw that seemed twice what it should be. Distorted and dangerous and standing five feet above John. _Shit_.

Daniel held his hands up and shied away from the pinprick touch of the claw tips as much as possible as he was pushed down the stairs, step at a time. Sheppard backed off, lowering the gun only because he had no shot at all. When he got to the landing, he saw that his team had disappeared, though not out the back door. The sound of gunshots from the lobby echoed around the stairwell and seemed to mock him, so Sheppard sidestepped down the stairs so he could watch the werewolf in the hooded jacket.

The outside door was mangled in the center, the emergency push bar torn off and wedged in the frame, the metal hydraulic mechanism that actually opened the door itself bent down and blocking the door from moving. Well, _this_ badly planned idea was looking better and better every minute.

"That is not how I left that," Daniel pointed out helpfully when he saw the door.

"Yeah, gathered that," replied Sheppard, humoring the werewolf by making it down to the empty landing and holding open the door that led out into the first floor of the bank. He could hear Ronon and Teyla shouting at each other, Ronon's magnum making a good show. Sheppard stopped there, creating a subtle standoff at the door to test the werewolf. This one didn't move like the others. Maybe he was older, or injured, and Sheppard had to try.

"Out," the man said. Sheppard still didn't have a shot. He hesitated before stepping out into the bank hallway again, his nose burning from the acrid smell he was beginning to assume was the Alpha werewolves. Ronon let out a shout and caught Sheppard's attention down the hall and out into the lobby.

The distraction got him pounced from the side and sent sprawling across the marble by the approximate force of being charged by a horse. That freaking _hurt_ and the dials were no help. The Glock with the aconite-packed bullets slipped out of his hand and he reached and turned on his side to get it back, but the werewolf that had dropped him was suddenly on him, clawed hand on his face and sharp fangs in his shoulder. Sheppard shouted from the burning pain of it and tried to close his right hand over the gun again.

At the same time, there was a crash from the lobby, people shouting and guns going off. Nothing but noise, and chaos, and somewhere out of sight, Rodney shouting at Stiles. That had to be a good sign. Sheppard got the gun and jerked, twisting to shoot the red-eyed monster in the chest while it was distracted by the lobby. The mini-hulk sized werewolf staggered back and sent Daniel and _his_ werewolf problem crashing into the wall.

Sheppard scrambled to his feet, favoring his on-fire left shoulder. Daniel was a bloody mess of his own but he kicked his way out and toward Sheppard. They could still run.

They made a break across the hall and toward the doors, Sheppard somehow not surprised to see their rental SUV crashed through the front entry doors of the bank. His team was pinned just to the right of the entry alcove, with Rodney crouched down beside Stiles and Blair to help protect the kid's senses against the noise from the shots being fired all around. The SUV's car alarm was going off, with the front end a mess and the driver door hanging open. The team had hardly any concealment aside from the truck, the bank's checker desks long since demolished in the building. Every time Ronon tried to clear a path to get them out, Kincaid's men started shooting up the SUV that was their only cover. And somewhere in the mess were more werewolves.

"Daedalus!" Sheppard heard Daniel shout. "We need extraction!"

That was a fucking brilliant idea and Sheppard stopped running to slide on his side and get to Rodney. If Sam had thought to give them the earwigs, maybe his fledgling team had been sent off with locator beacons, too. If not, their transmitters would have to do. He risked tucking the gun in the holster and looked around. The only face he wasn't seeing was Hale.

"Everybody, grab a buddy!" he shouted. Daniel crashed down behind Ellison and Sandburg and Sheppard caught Stiles by the wrist.

"Derek!" Rodney shouted, and suddenly Sheppard was slammed into by a furry body. A wolf. Four-legs and fur-coat wolf. _God_ but Sheppard hoped this one was friendly.

"Somebody tell 'em we're gonna need a medic," Sheppard called out to anybody with a radio who could hear him. There was some voice in his head- that sounded a lot like Carson - reminding him the transport beam was a bad idea, but just then, he couldn't remember why. The cozy glow of the lights showed up just in time as he saw the two ugly werewolves had finally recovered enough to head for them.

One minute they were in the dark bank, the next second they were on the Daedalus command deck. Colonel Stephen Caldwell stared down at Sheppard with a look of shock that was almost comical to John just then. Not quite home sweet home, but Sheppard would accept it over being a chew toy for a mutated, rabid werewolf. _Could werewolves get rabies?_ Hell, John couldn't remember if that was one of those he had to get reupped a few years earlier... things were fuzzy.

He collapsed back on the floor as he felt the buzz of his senses kick up again. Ancient tech welcoming him back aboard. Rodney let Stiles up as Blair and Ellison blinked around at the unexpected change in surroundings. Teyla very quickly got the men to lower their weapons before there could be any incident. Daniel sat on the floor a few feet away and Sheppard easily saw the bloody face and shoulder and figured he didn't look much better. There was a wolf butt wagging a tail between him and Rodney, but John couldn't seem to move to get around it.

He couldn't move.

"Uh. Medic?" he asked, fighting a rising sort of panic. "Problems..."

Rodney shoved at the wolf without apparent fear to make it move out of the way and was suddenly kneeling at John's shoulder. The bloody one. That Sheppard couldn't feel anymore.

"What the hell happened?" he demanded. "Where did you- what is this-"

"Got bit..." Sheppard reported. "Why can't I move?"

Suddenly the wolf scrambled back into Rodney as Stiles slumped over on the floor. Blair did a similar back-shuffle and stumble as Ellison went from standing up to falling down. It was around about that time that every nerve in John's body lit up like someone had doused him with water before clamping him up to a car battery. He started swearing as he seized up and Rodney tried to hold him still. He was saying something, probably yelling, but John couldn't hear him at all. No voice, no heartbeat, no anything. He tried to hang on to his vision as long as he could, but that... blacked out.

*~*~*


	33. Chapter 33

**Milky Way Galaxy: The Daedalus**

The Daedalus infirmary was stocked and revitalized after being back in Earth orbit for a week. It was a good thing, because Lt. Colonel John Sheppard's team was going to clean them out.

Teyla Emmagen had landed in glass, concrete, and stone, dodging an attack from one of Kincaid's men, and her shoulder was a red rash of road-burn and lacerations. Ronan Dex had been surprised from above as they made it to the lobby, getting shot along the arm and another deep cut along his side when one of the terrorists had somehow made it to the second floor without meeting a werewolf to take potshots at the team. It was little more than a couple of deep cuts to Ronon and it had taken more work to get him to agree to stitches. He and Teyla stayed out of the way but kept near the medbay to keep an eye on the rest of their team.

The three sentinel were unconscious, actually in comas from all appearances this time. Of them, Captain Jim Ellison had suffered gashes across his arms from charging through an attack from a werewolf, and various cuts from shattered glass. Stiles Stilinski had fresh cuts over his arms and a new bruise from the seat belt across his chest from when he slammed a Ford Explorer through the bank's front doors. And John's left shoulder and face were a mess from a werewolf attack, but that was a secondary problem to the coma in general. The Sentinel had to wake up before anything else could be done, more than clean up the wounds while they couldn’t feel the pain.

The Guides, however, were fine. Blair was fine. Jim was very dedicated to his role as a blessed protector of his Guide and the two men worked well as a team to make the job a little less dangerous. The only blood on Blair had belonged to other people. And Rodney was adept at taking cover and following the crowd, so he didn't have many more bruises than he did going into the fight. Derek had a three-lined stripe across his back that strangely hadn't healed; he said it was from claw marks from an Alpha, and they would scar over in a day. It was odd that Rodney found that more disturbing than the instant healing.

Carson had been pulled up to help deal with it all, and he and Blair had made the decision to treat the Sentinels' conditions as legitimate comas. Not zone outs. A real problem, not related to their senses, and once John, Jim, and Stiles were as stable as they could manage, Carson unleashed a five minute rant in the middle of the room. He went off about not ever letting the people with the hyperactive sensory capacity go through a process that dematerialized and rearranged their atoms in a digital environment before reassembly in an environment surrounded by Ancient tech that they were all keenly aware used the ProX and ATA combination as a power source.

No one else on the Daedalus was aware of it, but Carson, Rodney, and Caldwell had all previously had various conversations on the topic and Carson was in a mood to hold the ship responsible for the mix-up as long as it meant his medical orders were listened to going forward.

It wasn't like Rodney, Daniel, or Blair had been thinking about that particular problem when faced with werewolves and terrorists' bullet fire. Only slightly more privately, Carson was very clear on the point that he held it on Rodney, as his default-genius on all things Ancient, even if he was still an idiot about all things Sentinel. He and Sandburg each had a piece of the puzzle maybe, but they hadn't had a chance to compare notes at the time.

But the comatose Sentinel weren't the problem at the moment. The problem was that Sheppard's team had a member of SG-1 with them. It wasn't just AR-1 they had risked. And, like Sheppard, Daniel Jackson had been hurt badly enough that no one knew what to expect, because none of the medical staff had ever dealt with anything larger than a dog bite. Werewolves were all new territory. And after an hour of flushing and treating the bites and claw marks on both Daniel and John, Carson and the Daedalus medical staff had to hope it healed because there wasn't much else they could do.

Carson had pulled the once-again human-shaped Derek Hale away from Stiles in order to get the full and complete, unabridged, medical history on how to deal with werewolves. They sat in an office at the end of the room with glass walls and Rodney had never seen the doctor so pale as he took notes.

While Sheppard was down in a pain-induced coma, Daniel sat propped up on the bed to enjoy the pain medications because what else was he supposed to do? He was shocky and had his arm strapped to his chest so he couldn’t damage the muscles more than the deep puncture wounds already had. Colonel Caldwell checked on Daniel and wanted an update from Rodney, but Rodney didn't want to be there. Everything in him said he needed to be sitting where John could reach him.

But he had a _rank_ now and had to listen when the ship's Colonel told him to move. It was going to take getting used to.

"Werewolves!" Colonel Caldwell wanted to know. "Sheppard took his team on a _hunt_ to find _werewolves_?"

"Yes sir," said Rodney. It was an oversimplification, but it was close enough. He kept his voice quiet, glancing over at the three Sentinel laid out across the room. Caldwell didn't seem to take the hint.

" _He's_ been bit. _Jackson's_ been bit. And our only expert on what that even means? Happens to _be_ a werewolf."

"I think we're actually pretty lucky for that," said Rodney. "Hale can actually help."

" _My point_ is that he shouldn't have to," said Caldwell. The Colonel looked back at Rodney again and paused, a weird dissonance between his anger and his perpetual confusion at seeing the scientist in an already-stained Lt. Colonel's Air Force uniform rather than the science lab colors of Atlantis. He still had to try it out. "What the hell were you thinking, Lt. Colonel McKay? You of all people should have put an end to that mission before it even got started."

"He didn't clear it with me," Rodney replied, rolling his eyes. "He took it to _Sam_."

"He didn't mention werewolves," said Daniel quickly. He sat on the bed, hugging his shoulder and looking tired. He had been cleaned up and was alert enough, but slightly spacey. Nothing had kicked in yet, and who knew what would happen. It wasn’t like they were friends really, workplace rival-geniuses at best, but Rodney just felt sick about what happened to him. Daniel didn't seem to notice and shook his head. "There was nothing at all about hunting werewolves when he asked for transport."

"We needed the paperwork, the werewolves were a _possibility_ , but the damn paper-"

"Did you need the paper _that_ badly?" Caldwell insisted.

"Oh for fucks sake, what did you honestly _think_ he was going to do?" Rodney blurted. He did raise his voice then. Sandburg stopped loitering around Ellison and moved to investigate. Daniel stared at Rodney, considering, maybe, somewhere under the dull surprise.

“After a month of _this_? Of the infirmary, and- and- and babysitters, and the Project in his face? _He’s_ the goddamned Lt. Colonel and he had to give that over so _I_ could sign off on every decision he ever makes from here on out,” Rodney went on, impatient and snappish at being cornered because of everyone else’s apparent ignorance of how Sheppard operated. “I know _science_ , Colonel. I know math. And genetics. And wormholes. I don’t know... _this_ stuff! But even _I_ knew the second he had a clear path he was going to find a fight. Teyla and Dex knew it. Hell, _Ellison_ got us the guns. You’re going to tell me now that nobody saw this freight train on the way this morning?”

Blair stood by Rodney, arms crossed as he supervised wordlessly. He was as serious as Ellison suddenly, a strange, short, dark reflection of his partner, who lay unconscious across the room. And he offered no argument. It was a strange sort of unexpected support.

"Someone should have stopped it," said Caldwell. “You were on _Earth_ -”

“Can’t prove it,” replied Rodney, punchy. “There’s werewolves there. And in order for him to keep his job, what’s _left of it_ , John had to give up basically _everything_ else. Then the Project told him that to keep _his team_ , we needed the paperwork signed. This was any other mission on any other planet. Anybody who didn’t see this coming is a moron, to be completely frank.”

The remorseless comment hung there in the silence for a moment and Rodney wanted to be anywhere else but in the infirmary. Daniel had at least stopped glaring at him, but Caldwell looked like he was fit to have kittens. Sandburg looked from Rodney to Caldwell then and back, tapping Rodney on the shoulder to draw his attention back to friendly territory.

“And, just for the record, Derek said we got it,” he said. He checked his watch briefly. “Stiles and Derek sent it to Colonel Carter. Their friend Lydia’s playing courier so it should be there within the hour.”

Rodney looked over at the man, not sure what to do with the news. John would call that a win. But on the other hand, it still felt weird to have someone backing him against the abuse after the day they’d had. Especially Sandburg, when Ellison was just as comatose as John after the failure with the transport beam. Still, Rodney felt the grin tug at the edge of his mouth despite himself. He crossed his arms and squared his shoulders a bit. Maybe they’d ended up a bit rough, but the new team pulled together a win right out of the gate. So to speak.

"That’s good, but weren't there _other ways_ to do it?" Caldwell asked.

"How? When you need a signature from a person, it rather necessarily requires _finding_ him first, werewolf or not," replied Rodney.

"We had no way to know the Sunrise Patriots would be there," added Blair. "Who knows how it would have gone down if they hadn't shown up."

"I doubt there would have been a _tea party_ ," replied Caldwell. "You're lucky those idiots didn't show up with-" He broke off, shaking his head. "You’re lucky."

Rodney frowned. "We have no idea why they were there or what they wanted. They were apparently tracking Jim. They knew at least he was a Sentinel, based on their behavior."

Caldwell pinched the bridge of his nose. "Can't explain. Classified, Lt. Colonel."

Rodney gawked. "I _have_ clearance-"

"I'm still cleared for anything Colonel Sheppard should know," added Sandburg. "Check with General O'Neill of Homeworld-"

"God, they made this damn thing complicated," Rodney heard Caldwell complain. He nodded.

"Tell me about it," replied he and Blair at nearly the same time.

Caldwell raised an eyebrow at the twin response but shook his head. "Look, the Trust, in their _infinite_ wisdom, has been working with the Sunrise Patriots and a few other nationalist militias to recruit, and to distribute the weapons they think will help their agenda. You're lucky they didn't show up armed with more than bullets, is what I'm saying."

Rodney suddenly felt like sitting down was a great idea, but there were no chairs handy. He leaned unobtrusively against the foot of Daniel's bed. Blair looked confused.

"Catch me up, here, man. The Trust?" he asked.

"They're a rogue agency that has become uncommonly good at infiltration in the last few years," Caldwell said, looking quite pained by the topic. It was probably giving him a nice headache, and Rodney scoffed without sympathy. "Primarily focused on re-purposing alien technologies to gain an upper hand in the war they want to start with... basically an entire galaxy more technologically advanced than humanity."

"They tried to blow up Atlantis three months back," Rodney said. He was feeling charitable enough _not_ to point out they had used Caldwell as their unwilling operative to do it, but that was mostly because he was too exhausted to care. The thought of a nutjob like Kincaid getting his hands on so much as a zat gun was just... tiring.

Blair's eyes went wide. "Kincaid has had it out for us for fifteen years. And you're telling me he has alien technology in a warehouse somewhere?"

"To my knowledge? It's a distinct possibility," said Caldwell. Blair had lost all color and clapped a hand over his mouth as he stared back at Jim.

Caldwell looked at Rodney again. "This is what I meant, McKay. This was, in every way, a dumb idea. There was no plan, no recon, not enough intel... this was not a mission. You let him drag everyone into a suicide run."

"That is _not_ -"

"It is. Stopping this kind of thing from happening is why you were given his rank. So you can override it. _Make him_ sit down and think before he sends his team in blind," said Caldwell.

"I will not second-guess every call he makes," said Rodney. "If that was what this was for, he wouldn't have a job at all."

"No, you're there to stop the stupid calls," replied Caldwell. "Those he _should_ know better than to make but is too disabled by his senses to appropriately understand. That's where you come in. Otherwise, yes, _you're_ risking _his_ command by allowing it."

Caldwell looked to Blair for confirmation and there was a long quiet as Sandburg winced and tried to find words.

"Sir, yes, that's all true," Blair finally managed. He looked briefly at Rodney but directed his attention to Caldwell. "But as the experienced Guide on the team, as the one currently active on file as _responsible_ for Colonels Sheppard _and_ McKay during their training... I assure you, this was not one of those calls. Sure, it ended up completely FUBAR. But that _wasn't_ because of a Sentinel commander making a bad call."

"He's angry but he's not _stupid_ ," added Rodney.

"You’re sure about that?" the Colonel asked. "Because every member of your team has been through the infirmary in the last two hours. After fighting _werewolves_ and _terrorists_. For a piece of _paper_?"

Rodney hesitated. Well, when he put it _that_ way, it sounded stupid. "Just to _clarify_ , it was to keep the _team_. We brought Stiles and Derek on. We need them on Atlantis. He wasn't going to risk them getting sidelined on another technicality because the kid's too young."

Caldwell considered it, his frustration banked enough to try to understand. "Fine," he finally said. He looked to Blair and pointed vaguely toward Rodney. "But you're going to have to get _him_ up to par on reporting this stuff. Sheppard's a wild card and always has been, and something like this has to be covered _completely_ in the debriefing. Understood?" His attention went back to Rodney. "We need Sheppard at that outpost. Don't let him fuck things up like this again. And any report you give, you answer the questions before your senior officers can think to ask them. _That's_ in your skill set, McKay. That's how you clean up after him."

"Yes sir," said Blair, nodding. Rodney stared.

"I literally _just_ got here," he said. "I _don't know_ how the military-"

"Exactly. And _I'm_ just the ambulance on this mission of yours. So if you can't convince _me_ that your Sentinel didn't just snap and endanger his team and others, how the hell do you think you'll convince the brass?" Caldwell asked. "You might not know what you're doing yet, but you're in the driver's seat on this one anyway, Rodney. Not knowing won't cut it. Work on it. Before General O'Neill gets involved."

"Oh." Rodney realized the Colonel's point then. People expected the Lt. Colonel to actually be able to answer for something. Not just complain about everything that was done wrong. Or wasn't _fair_.

Maybe Rodney was brand new at being military, but he had already gone on a mission. No training wheels. Which meant no training wheels in the aftermath, either. Sheppard was in a coma and wouldn't be able to deflect any questions or fight to keep his job. That fell on Rodney.

"Uh. I'll start working on the report," he said. He added an awkward "Sir," as a hurried afterthought. Caldwell seemed to accept it. He nodded and stepped away, saying he would leave them to it. Blair caught Rodney by the shoulder, a very hands-on, touchy-feely kinda support guy, but it didn't bother Rodney just then. He started to wonder if maybe he had been hit on the head after all, maybe Carson should check for concussion.

"Rodney," Daniel said. He had been quiet the whole time, for ages, and Rodney startled at hearing his voice. He looked up and Daniel didn't seem angry with him. "It's been a long time since lunch. You should go get food before the hypoglycemia hits."

Oh.

"That's... probably a good idea, actually, " Rodney said. He didn't feel faint, but he wasn't quite feeling much. Low-level anger and panic had been burning all day, and everything else just kind of didn't register. His watch said he had missed dinner by three hours.

"I'll just... I'll go then," he decided. He turned and crossed the room, made it as far as Sheppard's too-small infirmary bed, and contemplated the chair next to it. He wasn't hungry yet. Maybe he could just wait until his stomach got loud.

"Rodney," Daniel's voice called after him. "John's not food."

"I'll get him," said Blair. The Guide showed up at Rodney's shoulder then to steer him away, but Rodney dodged just enough. He caught John's right hand and tried to tease his fingers into a response, but they just lay curled over the blankets. It wasn’t exactly possible to take John with him in search of a meal, but the question still worked in his head for a few seconds.

"You can't help him if you pass out," Blair said. Of course, Rodney knew that already. But he probably shouldn't ignore it. He squeezed John's hand and leaned down to kiss his forehead, staying clear of the pink-tinted gauze bandage along the side of his face. He would get food. And then be right back to check on John again. And write the report to send down to Sam and General O'Neill.

*~*~*

Sandburg made Rodney sit and eat an actual meal rather than get away with a few power bars. So far since Rodney had known the man, Blair didn’t do _quiet_ very well. He was usually rambling about something, talking with his hands, especially if there was a plate of food in front of him. But this meal time was quiet. Rodney bounced his leg and alternated between shoveling food into his mouth, and pushing it around on the plate, with no interest in actually eating it either way.

“Look,” Blair began, seeing Rodney nearly choke on a grape. “I get you wanna be there. I’m fighting that too. Trust me. Just take a minute right now, okay? Eat.”

“What if he wakes up?”

“That would be awesome, I am all for them waking up, as soon as possible,” replied Blair. “But it’s okay if it takes us a minute to get back there after. Carson’s watching them.”

It went against Rodney’s instinct, but if Blair was fighting the same thing then maybe it would be okay. The guy had to have had more practice at this stuff. Even if he had probably never had to deal with his Sentinel in a coma because of a bad reaction to a transport beam.

“I’ll see if I can change the sensitivity on the scrubbers in the beam,” Rodney said, thinking out loud. “I mean, we can’t exactly experiment to see if it... does this... but. Maybe for emergencies... At least we know there’s no problems with the Stargate. John walked through that. He zoned looking at it, but he said he was okay when we walked through.”

“Carson’s worried about it,” said Blair. He was listening attentively but would have no idea what Rodney was talking about, really, even if he and Sam and Daniel had traded notes the last few days.

“John says Carson can sit-” Rodney broke off as his earwig communicator chirped at him, paging. He sat up so fast he nearly knocked his chair sideways. He triggered the comm. “Carson?”

“No, Rodney. It’s Sam,” said Colonel Carter’s voice. “I just wanted to tell you, I’ve got one Lydia Martin here with me. She delivered Stiles’ things, and the form for the Project. She put _that_ in my hand.”

“Oh. Well. Good,” said Rodney. “If you could see that gets to the right...”

“Of course,” said Sam over the tinny crackle of the static. “She wants to know where Stiles is. I was wondering if I could get a status report on the team."

“No change,” he replied. “You... uh... probably don’t want to tell her. It won’t go over well.”

“I’ve gathered as much. That’s why I was looking for a report.”

“Sorry, I’ll write up the report after I finish eating, Colonel,” said Rodney, sitting up a little.

“I was looking for a _medical_ status report,” Sam clarified. “Just keep me posted. I’ll... see what I can do with Miss Martin in the meantime.”

She signed off and Rodney turned the comm off again. He finished what he could of his meal and then stood. Back to the infirmary for the Guides. There was no change in the Sentinel while they were gone. Carson had released Derek from the office and he had taken up a post on the foot of Stilinski's bed.

"Well, is it guaranteed, always, you know, going to... werewolf?" Daniel asked of Derek, the two of them talking across the medbay relatively easily. Derek sat up fully, comfortable enough, not looking very guilty for the sins of his werewolf kind. He shrugged and shook his head.

"It doesn't always take, no," he said. "I don't know what... triggers it, like they know with the ProX. It can fail. The body can reject it."

"Oh, good. Let's hope for that, then," said Daniel, seeming to be relieved at the prospect. Rodney was, too, and he hoped that Daniel's system had whatever genetic voodoo was required to kick the werewolf germs' collective theoretical ass.

But then he saw the way Derek leaned forward and caught the edge of the bed alongside his knees and just sort of stared at his shoes. It wasn't a drastic shift, and maybe he was just stretching or something. But it wasn’t the same as when the quiet young man sat square and dealt face to face with them, as Rodney had gotten used to seeing from him the last two days.

"Hopefully Carson can find something," Derek said.

"Sam found Lydia," Rodney offered, on the chance it would change the subject. Derek looked up then, and he did look relieved, but he stayed slouched off the edge of the bed.

"Well, I just lost five bucks," he said, though the smile didn't quite stick. "I was fifty/fifty on if she'd believe us to drive that far. She kept accusing us of trying to get rid of her. She wanted to get Stiles back to Scott."

Rodney settled into the chair near John. "Did Stiles get the book? The one he said he left at the hunter's place-"

"The bestiary?" Derek nodded. "It's on his laptop."

"Would it have anything Carson could use to help John and Daniel?" Rodney asked. "We could have it sent up."

"No good until Stiles wakes up," Derek said, finally looking at Rodney instead of the floor. Rodney gave him a flat look.

"If I can't get around a teenager's computer password, Daniel can shoot me, I'm done," said Rodney.

"Okay." The man across the room blindly agreed but then paused. "Wait- why am I shooting you?" Daniel asked, drowsy now and not quite following the conversation he had not been a part of until his name was mentioned.

Rodney ignored him and triggered the radio piece at his ear again to page Sam. He told her about the laptop in Lydia's possession and said he needed it. Sam said she would see what she could do, but it wasn't her most hopeful tone. There was no timeline given.

*~*~*

Rodney leaned against the edge of the bed and set his arm out against John’s over the blanket. He kept watching for John's fingers to climb over and take his hand, or pull at his wrist like they had been in his sleep the last few nights. He had trouble at it with the brace, but he always did it. But John stayed still, even his chest only barely seeming to rise and fall. Rodney stuck his chin on his arm and stared blindly across the bed, splitting his attention between John's face and the injured left shoulder.

It didn't actually accomplish anything, sitting there and watching over John, but it made the anxious knot in between his shoulders loosen up a little. Until he realized that time was still passing, and his mind started making lists of everything he needed to be working on if he was just going to sit still. Habit. And just... who Rodney was as a person. His brain didn’t sit still.

So he carefully leaned away from the bed so he wouldn't jostle John and then went to see Carson. The man was looking at a computer screen and not happy.

"I need a tablet," said McKay. He held up his hands to show the approximate size and shape of the thing he was looking for. "Mine is in my stuff..."

Carson narrowed his eyes slightly at him for it. "I haven't decided if I'm even talking to you yet. I won't be loaning out my medical equipment. You're likely to break it, too."

Rodney started to try to argue before he had actually understood the words. And once he understood them, he stopped, because he was too otherwise confused. There was obviously something he had missed, so Rodney dropped himself into the chair near his friend and stared at him.

"I don't break equipment. I fix it. I fix _your_ equipment. All. The. Time. Alongside the hundred other things I fix. So. I'm sorry for asking, but... what the _hell_ , Carson?"

Carson turned to look at him. Then he pointed toward the infirmary. " _Don't_ let Colonel Sheppard do dumb things, Rodney. An' I classify _dumb things_ as anything to himself or others that I cannae fix! And I cannae fix werewolf bites!" he complained. "For a month, almost two now, I have been working to keep the man sane, and now... whatever his trouble is, it just spreads. Turn him over to you for what, _three_ days, and he's in a proper _coma_."

The English broke off into a muttered and inconsistent Gaelic and then Carson turned his attention on his computer screen and scowled at it instead as he tapped angrily at the scrollbar to move through numbers on some chart about something or other that Rodney had no idea what it was. The grumbling was conversationally quiet and Rodney blinked at Carson, wondering if maybe he had managed to break the doctor.

It took a moment to realize that Carson’s rant had very little to do with Rodney at all, he just happened to be the one unlucky enough to walk in and receive it. So Rodney sat there and let his friend have a minute to recover from the panicked purge of words.

And then he very carefully tried again. "Are you better now?"

Carson didn't answer for a few seconds. Then he nodded. "Aye."

Rodney took a relieved breath. "I need a tablet, to write a report, so John still has his job when he wakes up," he said.

Carson sighed. He punched the scroll key a few more times and Rodney was pretty certain the man wasn't even reading the screen. Then, before Rodney could ask if he was okay, Carson slapped the tablet off the desk beside him and handed it over.

"That's mine. I'll have it back when you're done."

Rodney stood up and pried at the tablet to claim it, but Carson hung onto it another moment, looking up at him. "Go sit with him, please. Do whatever Guide thing you do that makes him wake up."

Rodney nodded and Carson gave him the tablet. He went back to the chair next to John's bed and started typing out the mission report for the day's Earth-run mission in Beacon Hills, California. It was successful at least, in that their mission objective had been achieved. But it would be an utter failure if the four injured men in the Daedalus' infirmary didn't recover from their assortment of injuries. Rodney wasn't sure if he was supposed to include that part in the report or not, though.

*~*~*

The plan hadn't been to fall asleep. Rodney realized he was only just waking up and peeked out from where he had somehow wedged his head up against John's right shoulder and his own. It wasn't a comfortable sprawl, but he could tell John was breathing, and very warm. Rodney sat up, blinking, and looked around.

Across the room, Daniel snored, so he seemed to be doing better. There was a black wolf curled up at the foot of Stiles' bed, the teen still just as still and lifeless as the other two Sentinel in the room. Blair had slouched into a chair and had his feet up on the bed, a pillow procured because Sandburg was apparently well practiced at making himself comfortable at hospital bedsides. Rodney usually just visited and left, couldn't even remember sending flowers to anyone aside from his sister, one time. _From Nevada, to Vancouver, with love, or whatever._

He was probably really bad at this part of being human.

Rodney saw the tablet he had been working on set on the side of the bed, just barely still within his reach. He hadn't made it through the whole report yet and there was a moment of panic that he had screwed it up. No one had asked him for it yet, but Caldwell's warning had made an impact. Rodney turned on the tablet and saw the report on the screen where he had left it, aside from the fact that the report was complete.

Wait. How?

Reading through it, the report was definitely accurate to how he remembered the mission going. Details had been added in that Rodney had missed in his falling-asleep state. Was it plagiarism to turn in a report someone else had partially completed? What were the rules? It wasn't an academic paper, not like he had to cite sources and prove every claim with peer reviewed evidence, but... he did have to certify it was true and accurate. Everything he read in it so far was accurate. His words had not been changed, just more of them added in to complete the picture. Maybe he had been more tired than he thought.

Rodney blinked at the tablet for a full minute. _Weird_. He set the tablet down and rested his forehead on John's shoulder again. The man was too hot.

He hadn't been awake very long before the doors on the other end of the room opened. He peeked over John to see Sam Carter walk in, a backpack over her shoulder. The red headed teenager who had been with Stiles the day before was now at Sam's heels, wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Rodney tapped his head against John, frustrated as everything got impossibly _more_ complicated.

The wolf sat up and took notice, stretched over Stiles and sniffed at his face. Then he turned around and jumped down, trotting into the office where Carson had holed up. The girl went right to Stiles' bedside as Carter assured her she would find Dr. Beckett. Rather than find Dr. Beckett, however, Sam walked over to Rodney. She took the backpack off her shoulder and dropped it at the base of his chair, set her hand on his shoulder.

"You okay?" Sam asked. Rodney blinked at her.

"I'm fine," he said. "No coma here."

"Okay then. Good place to start," said Sam. She looked up as the once-again-human Derek and Carson both walked out of the glass-walled computer room. It saved Sam the trip, so she settled back against the bed. She looked tired. Rodney looked around until he found his watch and the time. It was just after midnight.

"How's Daniel?" Sam asked quietly, worry evident.

"Snoring?" said Rodney. "So probably fine."

"Fine?" Sam echoed, surprised. Rodney shrugged.

"Derek said the body might reject it. And Daniel was awake earlier and seemed okay," said Rodney. He pointed at where Carson was fielding questions from Stiles' pushy girlfriend. "Carson's the one for the medical stuff, though. Wrong doctor."

Sam sighed and shook her head, but she smiled a little. "I know that, Rodney. Can you tell me what happened, at least?"

Rodney sat up a little straighter and reached for the tablet. "Colonel Caldwell said to write a report, so..."

That surprised Sam and she accepted the tablet. She stood and read in quiet for a few minutes as Rodney dug into the backpack at his feet and started to work on Stiles' laptop. It took him a little longer to disable Stiles' password than it took Sam to read. Then he was staring at a mess of a desktop and file folders that made no sense. Half of them were empty, aside from other file folders.

“Derek!” Rodney stood up and edged by Sam to get the laptop in front of Stiles’ Guide. “I can’t find the Bestiary in this mess. He’s probably got it named wrong.”

Lydia glared at him from across the bed but Derek just started looking for the file. The added teenager was unnerving and Rodney looked back at Sam. “Uh. Sam- err, Colonel Carter? Why is she here?”

Sam tapped a few things on the screen before tucking the tablet in and crossing her arms over it. “Because Stiles took _notes_. And _she_ read them before she gave me the form. So we negotiated.”

That strangely wasn’t surprising but it wasn’t welcome. He frowned at Sam. “Are we _encouraging_ blackmail now, or just... gonna roll with it?”

“There’s a difference between federal blackmail crimes, and insurance against injury and liability,” replied Lydia.

“Oh great, she’s a mini-lawyer,” muttered Rodney.

“Hardly,” scoffed Lydia. “Lawyers don’t win Fields Medals. Hard pass.”

Rodney blinked at the girl and then her oblivious friend Stiles. What the hell had they gotten themselves into with that boy. Rodney looked to Derek. “Are you done yet?”

The werewolf helpfully handed the computer back and Rodney made for the doctor’s office. “Carson! Research!” he called over his shoulder. The doctor excused himself and followed after, with Sam and Blair showing up in the doorway a moment later, too.

Rodney hardwired the laptop into Carson’s computer, thinking only belatedly about the dangers inherent in connecting them, given Stiles’ teenage comments on uniforms. If the kid’s internet porn corrupted the Daedalus somehow, that would be a new problem for somebody else to figure out. Just to be safe, though, he moved the file and quickly disconnected the laptop again. Carson was already in his chair and opening the file. He sent it to one of the larger screens so everyone could see the pages.

“What is this?” Blair asked.

“Everything the hunters have on werewolves,” said Rodney. “Or something like that.”

“Nice to know psychopaths have moved to the modern century,” replied Sandburg dryly. “Shareable PDF is much quicker than a library book.”

“This isn’t just werewolves,” said Carson. Rodney frowned as he too read the different categories listed on the digital book’s index.

“Yes, well, ignore the rest because it’s probably just fairy tales. Go see what they have about werewolves,” he suggested.

Too late, of course, as Carson had already gotten into some other random page about demons. It had _photos_ , not illustrated or hand carvings from some relic of a fairy tale book. And when Carson accidentally touched the screen in the wrong place, the frozen image turned into an embedded video. Of a demon. Attacking someone who was no longer living. Carson swore under his breath and left the page quickly.

Rodney couldn’t explain werewolves, but he didn’t have an explanation for demons, either. He tapped at his forehead and padded at the itch from the healing cut there, looking for a distraction. On second thought, he was good with everyone _else_ reading up on the things he couldn’t explain.

“I’m just... gonna go sit with Sheppard,” he said, hugging Stiles’ laptop to his side and slipping out into the medbay again.

*~*~*

Jim Ellison was the first one to wake up. Around two AM by Rodney's watch. He woke up in a panic, and Blair was out of the chair in a second to keep his partner from dragging the monitors and oxygen lines down. Rodney sat up, poised to help if needed, but Carson showed up and Rodney stayed back. He crossed his arms on the edge of the bed along John's arm and kept watch out of the way.

Ellison pushed himself up on his elbow, like he wanted to sit up, but it took some effort, and Sandburg's help. He tried to talk but his voice sounded fried, and he seemed frustrated after more than two words.

"Your senses reacted to the transport beam-" Blair began. Jim blinked, wide eyed, tried to repeat the word but gave up, so his Guide continued. "Yeah, that's what I said, man. It was the coolest fuckin' thing I've ever seen in my life but there's a definite drawback on the Sentinel side."

"What happened?" Jim managed actual words and Blair patted his shoulder and smiled broadly in celebration. "Everything was fire. Hurts."

"There's apparently some side-effects to the rematerialization, but we have no way to know without further tests," said Carson. "Colonel Sheppard had problems with certain areas of the ship, too. It could have been they brought you on board in the wrong area and the ship reacted strongly to the ProX."

"Well, _don't_ do it again," said Jim. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, under his own steam, and taking better stock of the few bandages and visible scrapes along his arms. He still looked shaky and caught Sandburg around the shoulders to tug him back loose against his chest, hiding behind his Guide with his arm across Blair's collar and palm hanging just over his heart. Blair slouched back into it, relief in every line of the younger man's face and body. Rodney felt a flash of jealousy and set his chin on John's arm again.

"It was an emergency or it wouldn't have been done at all," said Carson. "Daniel didn’t know of the problem when he ordered the extraction."

Ellison managed to take stock of the others in the room then. His nose twitched and he lifted a hand to cover it briefly, probably aligning his senses to the smells in the room. "Somebody's sick," he said. "Check 'em, doc."

Behind Ellison, Derek sat in the chair beside Stiles' bed on alert. "Stiles is normal," he reported quickly.

Rodney sat up then, looking from Ellison to where his sharper, blue gaze fell on Daniel. The SG-1 anthropologist was still asleep. Carson moved to check on Daniel's wounded shoulder, soon pulling back bloodied bandages. He stood over Daniel for a moment, a very serious crease across his brow and his face unreadable.

"Well. It's not Dr. Jackson," said Carson. He started back toward John then, leaving the bandages strewn on the blanket over Daniel. He started unwrapping the bandages over Sheppard's Shoulder then. "Derek, help? Rodney, I'll need ye tae call Carter in here."

Rodney backed off from the bed, mechanically triggering the comm mic on the radio to start paging Sam.

"Hell. His system is rejecting it," said Derek, quiet.

"What’s that mean? Isn't that a good thing?" Rodney asked. Blair shifted away from Jim to stay out of Carson’s way and moved to where he could see Rodney. He pointed to the chair behind Rodney.

"It means you sit where he can reach you, and don't move until he wakes up," said Blair, no heat to it, just firm fact. Rodney dropped into his chair without question, sneaking his hand under John's fingers.

"He's burning up," Carson said. Derek had backed off as the doctor started wiping at John's shoulder with something Rodney was thankful he couldn't see.

"He's been like that all night," Rodney replied. Carson glanced at him and then pushed at a corner of one of the monitors.

"Aye, at least a few hours. Damn," said Carson. Rodney wasn’t great with medical _anything_ and he slouched lower in his chair as Carson called the Daedalus med staff for help. He diverted his attention across to Daniel and saw the cleaned up and nearly clear skin on the man's shoulder. There was hardly any sign of the bite that Rodney had _definitely_ seen a few hours earlier. It was mostly healed already.

Rodney looked to John's shoulder, just to check, and still saw the angry red infected scratches and puncture marks, though they were no longer bleeding and messy. He looked to where Derek paced between the beds, the normally unreadable and disengaged young man the picture of anxiety as he crossed his arms and flexed his neck.

"What about Daniel?" Rodney asked him. Derek shook his head.

"He's going to be fine," said Derek. "I'm... gonna have to work with him, but he'll be okay."

The unspoken conclusion then was that John was the one in trouble. Rodney wanted to ask, because not knowing something was the thing he hated most, but he didn't want to risk the answer he didn't want to hear, either. So he kept his hand and arm alongside John's in case it helped him, and helped Carson and the nurse how he could but mostly tried to stay out of their way, and he waited where he was for John to pull through.

*~*~*


	34. Chapter 34

Consciousness hurt. Like, a _lot_. Stiles was only half aware that he was awake before he decided he didn't want to be.

"Stiles?" Derek's voice was at least quiet. Everything else was loud. Stiles' skin was being loud. It itched like fire and he could feel his heartbeat kicking at the ends of the hairs on his arms. There were chemicals on the air hitting his nose so badly that he could taste them in his mouth and they burned his throat. And Carson was whispering something somewhere but Stiles couldn’t understand the words because it was too loud. That was all without opening his eyes, and _that_ was a hell he didn't want to risk yet. At some point, Derek gave up on saying his name and caught Stiles' hand instead.

Woah.

Suddenly the baseline kicked in and sounds quieted in the room. The harsh smell of plastics, dust, and alcohols faded off and Stiles didn't taste anything other than his own tongue - way too dry. _Need water_. He cinched his fingers around Derek's and tried to curl his whole body toward him.

"Stiles? Wake up," said Derek. Stiles told him to fuck off, but his voice wasnt working, so all he heard of the attempt was something like " _fffff_ " and he scowled at himself for the failure. Derek put a hand over his forehead then and a little of the pins and needles fire in Stiles' skin stopped. He pressed against the touch and tried to tug Derek's other hand up into his gut, to make it happen all over, but that didn't work. He finally had to open his eyes and track down exactly where Derek was so he could get the man to make his _everything_ stop.

He was rewarded with an actual smile from Derek Sourwolf Hale. Derek looked away briefly, up at something over Stiles' head, and then over his shoulder. "Stiles is awake."

"No," grumbled Stiles. He tried to sit up and flailed at the first attempt because his muscles felt like dry straw grating together under his skin. Derek had to help him, and then, once Stiles was upright, he was able to wrangle himself out of the blankets toward Derek. Derek stood up to try to keep him from whatever he was doing, and Stiles caught him by the shoulders and dragged him close. Derek was better at coordination, he could figure it out. Stiles just needed to hang on for a minute. He set his cheek to Derek's neck and dug his chin into the back of his shoulder as just one more way to hang on.

"What the hell, Stiles," grumbled Derek.

"Help him," came another voice. Blair's voice. Blair was allowed to boss Derek, so Stiles nodded. _Listen to Blair, Derek_ , he thought at his friend, because speaking was not happening. Derek eventually figured out how to climb up onto the bed with Stiles blocking most of it so Stiles clumsily pulled Derek into his lap and slouched against his back. Things slowly started to cool down then and Stiles closed his eyes again.

Carson showed up and did whatever doctor-thing he had to do, and Stiles hissed at the sharp feel of the cold stethoscope and the doctor’s hands that seemed way too hot. Carson asked questions and Stiles ignored them unless he could nod or shake his head. Someone draped a soft blanket over his back and Stiles wanted to go to sleep again until his brain stopped the incessant buzzing. He probably did fall asleep, but he didn’t remember it.

When the all-over fire finally stopped and Stiles' head cleared, there was still a lot of static buzz clogging everything, but he was at least aware of being able to think again. And then he could wake up. His brain actually worked for _thinking_ instead of registering pain. The room was bright, but he could open his eyes, and he could make out individual sounds instead of just a wall of noise. It was a massive improvement.

And Stiles came to the clear realization that he had no freaking clue where he was or how he had gotten there.

"Is this real?" It wasn't the most intelligent thing he had ever said, but it had to be valid. Everything looked mechanical, like a submarine, but everything was bigger, and not claustrophobic like his dad had said subs could be. If a submarine and a cargo plane from the movies had a baby, it would look like where Stiles and Derek sat, except this place looked... different. Very different.

"Yep. Real. They said this is the Daedalus," said Derek. Stiles stared at the room and the handful of people in it and tried to wrap his head around it. His mouth worked on empty air a few times before he managed actual words.

"Like... space? This is a _space_ ship? We are-" he stopped rambling when Derek nodded.

"There's windows in a few places, but Carson said Sheppard got sick if he looked at them," Derek offered. "So maybe wait on looking around."

Stiles nodded absently, his eyes tracking to see Sheppard on the bed one over from them. The Colonel had a bandage on the side of his face but his shoulder was uncovered. The awe of the ship faded away quickly and Stiles found himself focusing in on the injured Sentinel.

"He got bit."

Derek nodded. Stiles still leaned on him, but Derek sat up a little. "So did Daniel. He'll be fine."

"But Sheppard's..." began Stiles. "What can we-"

"I don't know. I've only ever seen these go one way," said Derek, quiet. Stiles looked from John to Rodney, where the scientist had wedged himself against the bed and seemed to be asleep, as much as he could at that angle with his head tucked to John's shoulder and his shoulder tucked under the Colonel's uninjured arm.

Derek experimentally tried to pull away enough to look at Stiles, but Stiles just trapped him in with his legs. Things got loud when Derek moved away and, while Stiles wasn’t thrilled at that, it was a reality he didn't _have_ to answer to yet. Derek told him, "Carson and Colonel Carter are doing blood tests and trying to figure out why Daniel's system accepted it and Sheppard's didn't. I don't know how long that will take, though. And he hasn't woken up yet."

Derek pointed Stiles’ attention to the separate office at the end of the room. Behind the window, Carson and Sam were pointing at something on a computer screen, and Daniel stood off behind them, looking at something on a big TV screen that looked like it had pages from the Bestiary on it. The only way they’d have that is if Lydia had come through for them. Stiles tapped Derek’s arm. “You owe me five bucks.”

Derek just rolled his eyes at that and Stiles noticed he didn’t reach for his wallet.

As the pins and needles feeling faded out, the smells in the room started to get to him and Stiles tugged his shirt up to rest over his nose. The headache was coming back, but he wasn't sure if that was the smells or the buzzing, staticky feeling on the air around him.

"It's weird here."

"Yeah, all I smell is alcohol and-" Derek broke off, glancing at Rodney and John to make sure they were still asleep. He didn't have to finish it. Stiles could smell it, too. _That_ was what death smelled like? Colonel Sheppard wasn't allowed to die yet; Stiles still needed his help.

"How do we make it stop?" Stiles asked into his shirt.

"Make it stop- Aside from the obvious, which we can't do?" Derek replied, judgey eyebrow disapproving of the question. "Or how do you stop smelling it?"

"Yes," said Stiles.

"If you had read the-"

"Don't you _dare_ tell me about the stupid book," interrupted Stiles, a finger wagged in Derek's face for it. Derek shrugged and moved stiffly to finally free himself of Stiles’ clinging monkey impression.

"Then if you're done sleeping it off, maybe it's time to talk to Sandburg."

“Okay, but that was comfortable...” Stiles grabbed halfheartedly at Derek’s escape but he wasn't coordinated enough to win any ground. He carefully slid off the bed and was relieved when he didn’t get dizzy. The headaches were still just from his weird senses, no concussion. Derek made them stop by the office at the end, and gave the doctors the heads-up that they were going to try to find Blair and Jim because Stiles' senses were acting up.

"Does Lydia know he's awake yet?" Carter asked.

"Lydia-" Stiles blinked.

"I thought you sent her home?" Derek said.

"Nope, just tried to find her a bed. It's - oh. Well, it's oh-five-hundred. Everyone is probably asleep," the Colonel replied. She frowned and looked to Carson. The both of them looked beyond tired but showed no signs of slowing down.

"Don't wake up Rodney," Carson cautioned as he heard the time. "Who knows how long it will be until we have something to work with on this, and I don't want him hovering."

Stiles looked over at Derek, rethinking the plan of waking anyone up at five AM. He started to say something about it, but a noise from the mostly-empty infirmary behind him distracted him quickly. It sounded like someone had choked. He looked to see Sheppard convulse on the bed and Rodney startle awake.

"Carson!" Rodney shouted, and Stiles automatically ducked away from the noise, further into the office. Carson knocked his chair over in his hurry to get out of it. Stiles stayed in the office with a stunned-looking Daniel as the others rushed out to check on John.

The seizure lasted for a few minutes, with Carson and the nurses able to do little more than help Rodney keep John on his side. Stiles heard and smelled the retching when John was sick in the middle of it. Even Daniel reacted to it, reminding Stiles that the man had not rejected the bite and he stood in the room with a brand-new werewolf who knew how to kill people _without_ using claws and teeth. That was sobering.

When the seizure stopped, there was still a lot of activity near the bed. They switched John to a new bed. The IVs were hooked back up, the mess was cleaned up. And John still didn't wake up. But he was breathing, under the oxygen mask again.

Stiles kept an eye on Derek because he hung back, away from the medical staff, but watching over just as close. It seemed to be hitting Derek a little rough, which didn't quite make sense, because Derek had turned people before. He had found his pack of misfits and gotten them through the bite, he knew better than any of them what it was supposed to be. But then, Stiles realized, what was hitting Sheppard wasn't what it was supposed to be like.

Stiles didn’t ask to leave the infirmary after that. There were two more seizures over the next half hour and Carson was out of ideas on how to stop them. He resorted to having Rodney climb in bed and hold him, just because both Jim and Stiles had reached for the Guide when they woke up. Rodney was looking exceptionally pissed off about the whole thing, but it was kinda familiar to Stiles; he remembered watching his friends lose fights, and being helpless to keep them safe tended to make him desperately mad.

Daniel stayed in the office with Stiles, looking a little afraid of being involved. He did sit down at the computer Carson had abandoned though, looking into the chart that Carson had left open on the screen. He was at it for a while before Stiles heard him swear under his breath. He pushed away from the desk and left the room in a hurry. Stiles blinked, surprised.

“Carson!” he heard Daniel say. “It’s the ATA. I _don’t_ have it, and John _does_. And there’s enough tech in here... Maybe the _Daedalus_ is fighting the bite.”

What. The. _Hell_.

Stiles risked going out into the infirmary after that, because it didn’t make sense. But suddenly Rodney was demanding help moving John again.

“What are ye thinking?” Carson asked him. Rodney stared his friend full in the face.

“The command chair. It was using him as a power source. The ship’s gonna protect the power source,” said Rodney quickly. “They have a bloody brilliant self-diagnostic built into every system and everything shuts down if any _one_ thing is slightly off-”

“And it revitalized his system when he was done with it!” Carson caught on and they both started moving on the same game plan after that. Carter found a comm radio and started paging for somebody named Colonel Caldwell. They set up a gurney to transfer Sheppard to, and Derek did step forward then, easily moving John over before Rodney could complain about it. Daniel hung back near Stiles and looked on, confused.

“How’d he do that?” he asked. Stiles managed a grin and clapped the doctor on the arm.

“Werewolf,” he said. Daniel got the hint and looked down, very obviously considering his own strength. “Only for good though,” Stiles added quickly. “No evil.”

They followed the others through the ship, Stiles hurrying to keep up mostly because he knew he would get lost too easily. There was too much noise around him to keep track of Derek any way other than by sight. And Derek and his werewolf muscles were allowed to get Sheppard to wherever he was supposed to be, with Rodney leading the way.

When they met up with Colonel Caldwell, he seemed shocked to see Colonel Sheppard with them. “What’s he doing here?”

“Chair. Need it,” said Rodney, not even slowing down to deal with the man who seemed very much like the ship’s commander. The patches on his jacket said Daedelus and everything. Definitely his ship, and Rodney _definitely_ didn’t seem to care as he and Derek pulled the gurney into the middle of the room, right up to a big... chair. It looked like something elvish, with frosted blue glass and wood and metalwork all blended together. It was pretty, and it probably wasn’t a great idea to prop John up into it, as much of a mess as he was.

“ _Questions_ , Answer them,” Caldwell replied, and he didn’t sound patient. “What are you doing? And more importantly, what kind of damage can _he_ do to my ship in that state?”

“None,” said Rodney. He backed off as Derek moved John into the chair. “He can’t activate it until he wakes up. He just has to sit in it.”

“He’s still in a coma, Colonel,” Carson explained. “But the ATA seems to be fighting the bite. He either needs to stop fighting the change, or the ATA needs to get it out of his system entirely. Either way, if the ATA is interacting directly with the Ancient technology, something will move.”

Stiles startled when the _chair_ moved. Derek and Rodney had just barely gotten John sitting up when the back of the chair angled down and the feet lifted up like a recliner. The frosted blue glass started to glow and hum and Stiles clapped his hands over his ears.

“I thought you said he couldn’t activate it!” Caldwell said, way more loudly than he needed to in a big, empty, metal room. Stiles dodged over to Derek to get away from the commander and to find the manageable baseline he could hang on to when Derek was closer.

Nobody had an answer for Caldwell that time, and Carson, Rodney, Colonel Carter, and Daniel all just stared as the chair glowed very bright around Sheppard. Carson stepped closer to the chair and looked up as a floating hologram screen popped up three feet over Sheppard’s head. Weird writing scrolled across the image, and something like DNA chains were in blown up relief along the left panel.

“Bloody hell,” whispered Carson. He was almost smiling somewhere under the shock.

“What’s he doing to my ship?” Caldwell asked. Carson shook his head.

“Not a thing,” he said. “This is me.”

“God, Beckett. Don’t joke around with this stuff,” replied Caldwell.

“Sorry, Colonel. No joke. And I believe the command chair has a few previously undiscovered medical provisions built in, that will at some point warrant more exploration, I’m sure,” said Carson.

“Focus, Carson! Or I swear to god, I will break _everything_ in your office at home,” said Rodney, a panicked sort of angry.

“ _Settle_ , Rodney,” said Carson. He was the picture of relieved calm now as things moved around on the hologram screen above him. “He can hear you. Go easy...”

That changed the entire tension level in the room somehow. Stiles bumped into Derek’s shoulder and caught at his fingers, trying to stay focused as he started trying to track everyone in the room and the hologram images. His eyes kept focusing really close on some things and blurring out on others and it wasn’t always something Stiles was consciously choosing to do. He felt dizzy and didn’t know what a zone would feel like, so he reached for the only anchoring point he knew.

The glow from the chair seemed almost liquid as Stiles stared at it. It was blue like water, and he could see little bits of light shoot in arcs over and around Sheppard on the chair. But it was just light. Light didn’t break off like floating bolts of liquid electricity. He wanted to ask about it, but he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t just seeing things. So Stiles stayed back, let Derek be a shield, and tried to stay present.

“That’s looking better...” Carson muttered at the hologram screen. Nothing seemed to have changed as far as Stiles could tell, but the doctor looked cautiously pleased with himself. Another moment passed and then Sheppard started coughing again. Just a cough this time, though, thankfully. No seizures, no being sick on the command chair. When John opened his eyes, Carson stepped back away from the chair. The pop up screen disappeared and the brightness in the room dropped by almost half.

The chair stayed reclined until Sheppard coughed himself into sitting upright. Rodney surged forward then, somehow just barely not crowding him. Sheppard sat in the chair, trying to reorient himself with the living a lot more violently than Stiles had suffered through an hour earlier. Elbows on his knees and head down, John reached out and caught Rodney’s hand to tug him more actively into his space as a shield.

"Don't get too cozy," Carson said. He had the stethoscope out and held it up as he approached John again. "Once you've got your feet under ye, back to the infirmary. We need some blood work, A.S.A.P."

From the tired satisfaction on Carson’s face and the surprised relief on Derek's, Stiles had figured out that Sheppard had beaten the bite. He woke up and was moving, though not yet exactly talking, and after twelve hours, the wound still hadn't healed. It was just another bite, no different than a dog's bite, or a bad poison. Sheppard was hurt, but he was still himself. And it was one hundred percent better than being dead, because people who were bit usually ended up dead if their systems rejected the bite.

Somehow that reminded Stiles that he was hungry, and thirsty, and he wanted to go find Lydia, none of which involved the infirmary. When he chanced saying something about it out loud, Carson looked up from checking on Sheppard's vitals.

"Colonel, would ye mind seeing the lads to find a meal?" he asked of Caldwell, and Stiles almost lied and said he was fine rather than impose on the man with the very deep frown. Colonel Caldwell didn't seem enthusiastic about helping play tour guide on his ship, but he nodded and waved for Derek and Stiles to follow him.

"Never a dull moment around here lately, huh?" Caldwell said as they met up at the hallway. Stiles nodded slightly.

"This is probably pretty close to average for us," he replied. "Just... more spaceships."

*~*~*

It took a few hours for John to really get back up on his feet. Carson wouldn’t even let him walk back to the infirmary under his own steam. It was an annoying group project, with Daniel and Carson and Rodney all three towering over him as the ceilings of the Daedalus whisked by overhead. And then more IVs and even oxygen for a half an hour. Considering everything hurt anyway, John didn’t argue about it. But he was aware enough not to like it.

Rodney looked dead on his feet and John didn’t like that, either. Carson and Sam Carter didn’t look much better, and when they finally told him what the last twelve hours had actually entailed, it made a little bit of sense. If he hadn’t been unconscious, he probably would have looked the same state keeping up with them.

Teyla and Ronon showed up around the time John was fully conscious and aware of something other than his burning shoulder and face. Carson had kicked them out to sleep hours earlier because they sported their own bandages. Between the three of them, Carson was finally convinced to let the Daedalus medical crew take over watching John and go take a nap, and John figured he’d have the new guys convinced to let him go home inside of a few hours.

Carson’s last act of ownership of their infirmary, however, was to shove Rodney into the empty bed on the other side of John’s and tell him to take a pill to sleep. That effectively killed John’s schemes of leaving the infirmary for a few hours. He at least had a sizable team to keep him company, as everyone else had gotten rest. Even Stiles’ friend Lydia had been invited to the party, because she had scammed her way past Carter as easily as she worked over Stiles and Derek.

With Rodney sufficiently drugged, he curled up on his side and slept through the others coming and going. John could have done with a beer to go with the buzz of his team getting to celebrate a job well done. Stiles and Ellison had woken up and adjusted to the ship fine, though they complained of the noise the same as John. They spent most of the morning trying to work on the problem of Sentinel senses and the feedback from the Ancient tech. Trying to teach a seventeen year old kid with ADHD even the basics on meditation was an exercise in frustration and Blair actually threw his hands in the air and gave up. That didn’t stop Teyla and Daniel from trying, though.

The constant static noise of being on the ship was unignorable, though, and John tolerated it as long as he could. But even as they worked at trying to figure out how to make it stop, John gave up and resorted to the shortcut of the Guide baseline. He got himself out of the bed and moved the IVs around to let him climb up onto McKay’s bed. Ronon had to help a little, which was annoying, but John survived, and he sat up leaned against Rodney’s chest instead of the bed. Rodney didn’t seem to notice at all, just curled more tightly on his side to lean in on John.

“This is a design flaw,” John said, tapping at Rodney’s knee just alongside his own in the resulting puzzle-piecing they ended up in.

“It calms down,” said Jim. “Once you get used to reading yourself again. Till then, they’re the only mirror you’ve got, if things are up or down, too loud or too hard, whatever. Everything else changes, but your read on him won’t, so you readjust every time until you reset the default.”

John nodded, accepting the logic of it. Rodney had been around for two years, out on missions and back home off the clock running games and exploring Atlantis. He was familiar before the senses kicked in, and now he kept the dials from scrambling. But it sucked that Sheppard going down for a few hours could leave him completely wrecked just because John had to have him nearby to keep the world from suffocating him in a wall of noise and static.

“So, wait - it’s not, like, a fear response?” asked Stiles. “The... the senses going up and down. It’s not a heart rate thing-”

“That’s werewolves,” said Derek, quietly. He glanced over at Daniel. “Don’t lose your temper until we can work on this stuff. And find me if you start to slip, we’ll work it out.”

Daniel nodded. “Noted.”

“It’s your senses, Stiles. Like... Daniel and his glasses-” Blair broke off as Derek talked over him.

“Probably oughta lose the glasses, Dr. Jackson,” Derek said. “You shouldn’t actually need them. You’re just used to them.”

Blair gaped as Daniel took off his glasses and muttered an oath that definitely wasn’t English. Blair realigned his previous approach and tried again. “Okay, so like me and _my_ glasses... my vision is what it is. It’s not going to change. Whether I need to wear my glasses or not depends on what I’m doing, or the environment I’m in, not on my mood. I can't see any better than I am physically limited to, that's just how it is."

“And you and I can. We can amp it up when we need to, we can work one sense off the other in exchange for a little more mileage," said Jim. "Depending on how you use it, it's a huge asset. Or, as you saw yesterday, it can hurt like nothing else."

John was mentally fuzzy still, mostly from exhaustion, but he stared between Sandburg and Derek, a little surprised. "Hold up. Somebody sent the guy into _that_ meeting yesterday morning and he's still asking _this_ stuff?"

"He'd been drugged, John," said Blair. "His senses and reflexes are still delayed from actual _weeks_ of tranquilizers. With his system as sensitive as it is, he's lucky he's not still scrambled. Nothing we told him was going to make sense until he could experience them enough to _kind of_ control it. Somebody jumped the gun at the Project because I said he was on your team, so we were looking at a week instead of the time he should have had to recover fully."

The anger from the day before broke through then but John just nodded. "Good thing zone outs aren't tied to blood pressure," he observed dryly. He was back to feeling useless, all the same. He was done with recovery-mode and wanted to be moving. "Do we have to finish out training here? I want to be getting home."

The answer, of course, was yes. Especially since Stiles was online and feeling the range on the senses his DNA profile lab work said was there. High ATA meant high ProX, and the kid was in for the same hell John had been in for a month. And after the last twelve hours, John was willing to bet the Ancient tech on the Daedalus had messed with Stilinski the same way it had John. But the kid was getting the chance to train right from the start instead of fake it. And he was younger, of course, so in a day or two, John expected he’d be getting his ass kicked by a kid as well as Ellison. It was going to be _great_.

So while Rodney dozed and helped John keep the Daedalus from overloading his senses, the rest of the team, plus Daniel and the sassy Lydia, covered the from-the-beginning basics on the Sentinel stuff that Stiles needed to know, and the werewolf stuff that Daniel needed to know. Because John had decided he was risking keeping Hale on his team, even after being bitten, and that meant he and his team had to get an idea of what they didn’t know.

After five hours of it, John was annoyingly exhausted, and Carson showed back up fresh from a well deserved nap. Carter showed up not long after him, and that's when John got serious about waking Rodney. If he couldn’t go _home_ , he wanted to at least get out of the infirmary. Again.

The room had cleared out for the most part, and things had been quiet for a while. Carter had taken the kids on a tour of the ship because she was trying to buy Lydia’s cooperation rather than pick fights with the teen, and Blair and Jim had gone along for the obvious reasons of “ _Hell yeah, we want to see a spaceship_.” Daniel, however, was in the office, reading the hunters ' Bestiary to get himself ahead of anyone on Earth that would be potentially gunning for him from then on out. That just left Teyla and Ronon loitering around, and a handful of medical crew, all of which Rodney was oblivious to despite John having had entire conversations with everyone.

"What the hell did you give him, Carson?" John asked as Rodney continued to sleep through his efforts at waking him up. Carson grinned at him as he finally freed John from the IV lines.

"A placebo."

John choked on a laugh and had to work very hard to look disapproving on Rodney's behalf. "Thanks, Carson... _that's_ great."

He stared down at Rodney, waiting for the doctor’s words to settle in and wake him up, but his breathing and heart rate stayed consistent. He was deep asleep. From a placebo sleeping pill. John was going to have to drag out the heavy ordnance on this one. He looked to Teyla and Ronon where they sat, kindly still keeping him company until that point as Rodney snored.

“Why don’t you kids take off somewhere for a while,” he said, nodding toward the doors. “Take a breather before we get stuffed back in a sardine can with teenagers and McKay.”

“Right,” said Ronon slowly, a knowing grin on his face. John rolled his eyes and shrugged it off.

“Hey, man, you get stuck under a microscope for twenty-four hours, see how much you wanna share with the team at the end of it,” he replied. Ronon clapped him on the shoulder - the one that didn’t have an ugly looking werewolf bite on it - and stood up to leave. Teyla just smiled and caught John's hand to squeeze. They made themselves scarce and John relaxed against Rodney for the first time that morning. He wasn’t expected to be anything just then, no doctors to tolerate, no smiles to mirror back at anybody. He could just be himself for a minute; tired and cranky and sore as he was.

John curled into the corner of the pillows that Rodney didn’t have as claimed territory and sunk carefully into the bed. He probably could have fallen asleep just then, listening to Rodney breathe, feeling him right there in shared space. He could live with that. Even if he wasn’t looking forward to the hell he’d catch from Caldwell for it.

Resisting the pull of a nap, John tucked his arm up against Rodney's chest and tilted his forehead to Rodney's, wedging them together in the tiny bed without making some kind of scene in the infirmary. He had already tried the man's ticklish spots and failed, so now he could just catch all of the rest of him all at once.

"Rodney... wake up... Daedalus to McKay," John said, trying to be quiet but hoping it wasn't too quiet for Rodney's hearing. "Time to go back to Earth."

He waited a few more seconds, listening, trying to sort out if the man was still asleep or faking it. So far, all signs pointed to _asleep_. There was nothing John wanted more just then than to kiss Rodney awake.

But Rodney was the one with the tight space bubble and a very noticeable boundary on public displays that John didn't want to abuse at all more than they had to, what with Rodney having to be present for anything John ever did again in his career. They were publicly tied together and that might be as much as Rodney could handle, John didn't know. The Daedalus was probably not the best place to test it out without a conversation first.

"Hey, McKay!" John tried again. He hesitated, changed his tone a little, and added, "Lieutenant Colonel McKay!"

There were a few seconds of no change before he heard the shift in Rodney's breathing. "Yes sir," came the mumbled reply, Rodney still more than half asleep. It maybe kinda kicked John in the gut but he kept that to himself. He rubbed the back of his knuckles over Rodney's chest to try to draw him out the rest of the way.

"McKay, wake up and kiss me already. We got things to do," he said. "And don't call me _sir_. Bad idea. We need to just skip that one all entirely."

Rodney came around that time, blue eyes blinking at him, still tired and red. "Fine. Colonel, then?"

"Should be safe enough," said John. "You awake yet?"

Rodney nodded and snuck just enough closer for a sleepy kiss as requested. And then closed his eyes again. John caught his shirt and tugged, a halfhearted effort at getting him to sit up.

"We need to get back and finish training. Get yelled at probably. Can't be late for that," he said.

"Won't get yelled at. Made a report. Got the signature. Team good," Rodney told him.

"I know, Rodney. I helped write the report," said John. "But a report doesn't mean we don't get raked over coals on the debriefing. Wonder if that's why they call it a debriefing..."

Sheppard's idle pondering went completely unheard as Rodney's eyes blinked open wide.

"What do you mean, _you_ helped write it?" he asked.

"I kinda told the keyboard what to write when you got stuck, and you wrote it," said John. "And when you passed out... I used the Daedalus to fix it. If it was hijacking my brain like that, I was gonna put it to work."

Rodney’s mouth worked but no words happened. Sheppard shook his head.

"No, I _don't_ know how it worked. That's _your_ department. And Carson's," he said quickly. "I just know I was stuck in my own damn head and couldn't do anything, and then you started typing on the tablet, and I could type back. Like turning on the lights in Atlantis, or flying the Jumpers. I said the words in my head and they showed up in the report."

Rodney still stared at him in open disbelief. John felt himself rambling suddenly, not sure how to get away from the topic that apparently made Rodney McKay of all people doubt his sanity. "Either that or I had an out-of-body experience, on my deathbed, and got sucked back in because I stopped to fix your report on my way out, and _that_ would be the goddamn most depressing thing I have ever heard, so we're _not_ going with that explanation."

"Were you stuck in the buffers?" Rodney asked.

"No, I was stuck in _my head_ , marinating in _fire-pain_ ," said John. "It wasn’t great."

"But that makes no sense..."

"No kidding! But I was there for twelve hours. I don't read Ancient, I don't know what half the shit I saw even meant, but it worked, didn't it? Carson could fix the wiring with the chair, I got my brain back..."

Rodney startled John a little, reaching up to catch his face carefully between his hands. He was definitely wide awake now.

"We need to get you off the ship," said McKay.

"That was my point, yeah," replied Sheppard slowly. " _No freaking out_ about this, Rodney. _Promise_ me. I am not a lab rat and you will _not_ be probing my brain for residual traces of the Daedalus or something. _No_."

" _That’s_ not what I meant," said Rodney. John narrowed his eyes.

"You are such a bad liar. How did you actually get _worse_ at lying, McKay?"

"Oh come on! _You_ got the upgrade with the onboard lie-detector, how the hell do you _think_ I got worse when you got better at picking them up?"

They weren't being quiet anymore, mostly speaking in regular conversational voice, in the middle of the infirmary, wedged together in the same bed, arguing over Rodney's poor poker face. And it was a losing argument that would only ever lead to John conceding to a draw because Rodney wouldn't admit to anything, ever, unless _it_ led to a Nobel.

And John realized that with the upgrade of the on-board lie detection came a few other perks that Rodney was just going to have to deal with. And John wasn't going to concede to a draw on every stupid argument Rodney didn't want to just give up on anymore.

John shifted his weight forward, a hand at Rodney's hip to push, and pinned him back on the narrow bed enough to kiss him until he shut up about the stupid ship.

*~*~*


	35. Chapter 35

The Daedalus was a big ship and Colonel Carter didn't show them everything. They were shown probably just the tourist highlights, and nothing they could cause trouble with. It ended at the hangar where the _big_ ship housed all the _little_ ships and Stiles found his new favorite place to hang out. The static from the Daedalus was quietest there, and Stiles didn't want to consider why that might be exactly, he just wanted to enjoy it.

Carter showed them to a craft that looked like a rather speedy gray-blue _log_ , with a big, angled front view window. She called it a Puddle Jumper, and Stiles wanted to pet it and find it a food bowl; it was his new favorite thing and he instantly adopted it. Carter let them go inside the big back gate and the lights lit up inside like they were on a motion sensor when Stiles walked in. He spotted what had to be the pilot controls and made for the seat in front of them before anyone could stop him. The dashboard was all lit up and waiting for him.

"How's it work-" The question broke off as the front window screen popped up with a hologram, like he had seen over the chair with Sheppard first thing that morning. "Oh this is so cool..."

"Uhmm..." Colonel Carter looked up at the screen in mild concern.

"Stiles!" Derek barked at him. "Don't touch anything!"

"That's the frustrating part about some of this Ancient tech, Derek," Carter offered up. She moved to sit in the co-pilot's chair. "See, Stiles has the Ancients' genetic coding in his system. So even thousands of years later, their technology is still pre-programmed to respond to him. He doesn't actually have to touch anything to, - well, to be frank, to screw it up."

Stiles blinked at her and held his hands up sharply so he wouldn't accidentally touch anything important around the chair. "What?"

"I don't have the gene," Carter said, smiling a little as she looked at the dials and wheels on the dashboard in front of them. She shrugged lightly. "So I can't tell you exactly how to make this all work. But it responds to a different kind of operating system, I guess you could say. It reads your mind."

" _No_ thinking, Stiles," ordered Lydia quickly.

"One of his skills," replied Derek. Stiles silently mocked him and rolled his eyes. Ellison stood in the door and ducked past Blair and Lydia to peek out the window behind the hologram. Then he caught Stiles by the shoulder and tugged slightly in a hint.

"No pilot's chair for you for a while," he said. "Not after what the doc said you did to their Life-signs detector. Let's not supercharge the ships, too, huh?"

"That's probably best," agreed Carter. "At least until we have a pilot out here who can show you how it all works."

Stiles reluctantly abandoned his seat and followed Jim back to the rear compartment of the small ship. Derek happily invited himself to the pilot's chair.

"Sheppard's Air Force, he has the gene, right? Can he fly it?" Stiles asked. The Colonel nodded.

"Sure. Right now he's grounded because of the Sentinel Project policies, so he's just not supposed to fly it until he's cleared and certified as safe to be in the air."

"Colonel, if this is how we're getting home, I think I want to waive that particular policy," said Blair. Carter looked up at him, surprised. Blair motioned vaguely toward the controls. "Me and Jim should observe his interactions with the Ancient technology as much as possible so we can try to figure out how to shield these guys from it somehow. I'm eighty percent certain that meditation isn't going to cut it here. So maybe through observation we can pick something else up."

Stiles' jaw dropped and he edged over along the wall to get a look at Blair. The man in the doorway between sections looked down at him, completely innocent. Like he hadn't just _lied_ to the Colonel.

Carter shrugged. "He's a great pilot. But are you sure it's a good idea after this morning?"

"From what Carson said, it was the Ancient tech that saved his life this morning," Blair replied, nodding. "He should work with it more, not less, until he gets a handle on it. And he can't work with this stuff at the Project. Piloting a ship, he has to engage with it more than just passively. Actually use senses with the tech, rather than be surrounded by what the guys are describing as _noise_. So... yeah, I want to see if he can still fly it."

"Somebody's going down with us to bring this back up, so I don't see the harm," Carter said. "Yeah, I'll tell him the plan."

Carter touched the radio at her ear and it _chirped_ , sounding very loud to Stiles in the small space and he ducked away to go sit on the bench, trying to put more space between himself and the stabbing sound that had attacked his brain. Blair still leaned in the doorway and glanced back at him, but Stiles stubbornly waved him off. He had heard enough from everyone else that he could try to take care of it on his own. It just hurt though. He could hear Carson’s voice on the other end of the connection, as well as Colonel Carter’s in the next room, and going back and forth was like the warble of a sheet of tin foil.

But he tried the dial trick and listened for Derek in the front of the Jumper. He wasn't cringing by the time Carter was done talking on the ear-radio. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than it had been. Stiles could figure it out eventually.

Blair had ratted him out somehow, because Derek edged by the other Guide to sit down across from him and give him the eyebrow. Stiles shook his head at him. "I got it."

"Carson said they're on the way over," said Derek. Stiles stared at him, expression flat

"I heard..." he replied. Derek flashed a toothy smile at him, proud to annoy him apparently, and Stiles looked down because he wasn't going to be able to keep the grin off his face otherwise.

Up front, Lydia realized she was the only one she knew in the front of the ship and she ducked by Blair to get back to Stiles. Blair took the chair she abandoned and he and Ellison sat and talked to Carter about getting Ancients' tech outside of the SGC for a few days. They were busy talking, and Stiles wasn't in the pilot's chair making things light up, so the adults were good ignoring the teenagers again. Lydia latched onto Stiles' arm as she dropped down onto the bench beside him.

"When we get back, will you go back home with me?" Lydia asked, her voice quiet. "Just to talk to Scott?"

"I don't need to talk to Scott," said Stiles. "Or anybody else. I wasn't pack."

"Yes, you were," said Lydia. "You are."

Stiles shook his head, pointed a finger toward Derek. "Just his, maybe. The last few months. But from what Derek told me, if all he's got left is me and... uh, well, Erica... Scott's not going to get much of a boost."

"Stiles, you're still our friend. I missed you. Scott missed you..."

"Lydia, don't."

"No, Stiles, hear me out. I know you can hear me just fine, so listen, okay?" Lydia still had both arms wrapped around Stiles' one, and her chin on his shoulder as she stared at him from up close and kept her voice quiet.

" _You_ listen first," said Stiles, looking to meet her eyes. "Scott was my friend. Okay? Since as far back as I could remember. I'm not saying he wasn't. But he stopped listening to me a year ago. And I'm tired of being afraid of him, Lydia. I did it all this time and I thought he'd come around, and it cost me my dad. I literally have nothing left except Derek, okay? I can't play anymore. I told you."

Lydia glanced to Derek then, her expression lighter but slipping somewhat. "I understand. But... Scott doesn't listen to me. Allison stopped listening to me. You were the only one that ever had any luck with them. And I'm out of ideas. The Alphas-"

"Then get out, Lydia," said Derek. "You’re eighteen. You could go anywhere. Finish school somewhere else. If Scott wants to beat the Alphas and he doesn't have enough power? Then cut the power he's got. If everyone _leaves_ , there's no pack, he's not an alpha. The _Alphas_ leave. Before somebody else dies. Okay? Just... cut out. Before you get dragged in."

"The bite almost killed Sheppard," Stiles added, "And if it's the Sentinel thing that was rejecting the bite, I know it would kill me. It's not worth it. I _can't_ go back. I can't help my dad. I can't help you. And I won't help Scott."

"You could _talk_ to him," said Derek. "His word is still better than Deucalion's."

"Not by much," said Stiles. Derek frowned but left it alone. Stiles had the feeling Derek would revisit the subject of Scott some other time when Stiles didn't want to deal with it and Stiles was going to have to figure out how to punch a werewolf again when that happened. But it wasn't now.

There was a startling clatter from the open gate of the Jumper and Stiles looked up to see Sheppard had run up the ramp. From the looks of him, he had probably run the hallways to get there, too. He dumped Stiles' backpack in his lap as he made his way to the front of the ship. He did pause to make sure Stiles had it without disturbing Lydia, though, and Stiles looked up to see the reflection off the Colonel's sunglasses.

"You and me are gonna have a conversation when we get to the mainland," he said. It wasn't a threat or anything dangerous, but it was a heads up that he wouldn't be getting out of something. Stiles sat up a little, confused, and hugged his backpack to keep it out of the way as John rushed by.

"Carson said I'm flying us down," Sheppard said, still only slightly winded as he stepped into the front of the Jumper. He didn't even wait for a response before taking the open pilot's chair.

Blair clapped him on the shoulder as John turned toward the Jumper's controls and everything lit up again. Stiles ducked into the walkway between seats as there was the unexpected buzz of noise that sounded like it came from the walls around him.

"What was that?" he asked quickly.

"Engines," Sheppard called back.

"Uh, Colonel? Where's everybody else?" Carter asked. Sheppard waved vaguely off out the window in front of him.

"That way, somewhere," he said, distracted. He was having a moment with the flight controls, like he was a kid who had just been given free reign over a candy store. It struck Stiles as funny and, though he still felt Lydia leaned on his side and hadn't forgotten the unwanted conversation Sheppard had interrupted, it was a good excuse not to go back to stressing about Beacon Hills. Stiles grinned over at Derek, feeling excited about the call they had made to stick it out with the crazy science geeks and their military Sentinels.

" _Spaceships_ , man," he whispered. And Derek smiled back.

There was more stomping on the gate ramp into the Jumper and Stiles looked over to see Rodney hurrying inside, the scientist already glaring at the front section of the Jumper.

"You couldn't wait until we got here to start her up? Really?" Rodney said, more than loud enough for Sheppard to have heard, because Stiles had to force himself not to cover his ears. "What are you, twelve?"

"And a _half_ ," Sheppard called back. Rodney looked like he had run more than he wanted to ever in his life as he leaned on the door into the front half of the ship.

"Sam... I call shotgun," Rodney huffed.

"Oh, _now_ you're okay with shotguns," said Sheppard.

"Why... _why_ did we go to all that trouble this morning... we could have _slept in_..." Rodney was muttering as Carter ducked by him to free up the co-pilot's seat.

"Hey, _shut up_ , or I'll kiss ya again," John warned, turning to make sure Rodney took his seat without damaging himself. Stiles couldn't see Rodney because of the wall between the ship sections, but the threat must have worked because Rodney stopped complaining and John sat and smiled at him like he had gotten away with something.

Stiles relaxed and sat back against the wall, smiling at the Colonel's antics because everybody else was. Lydia wasn't really smiling, but she had settled down a little again. She followed Stiles though and curled up at his shoulder, even though she had let go of his arm. Derek switched to sit next to Stiles when Daniel and Carson finally showed up. He tucked Stiles' backpack at his feet to get it off the bench, and wedged himself in against the wall beside Stiles.

Stiles instantly latched onto his hand. A year ago, Stiles had maintained a ten-year plan to someday make Lydia fall madly in love with him, but even that had faded since finally getting to know her. She had become a friend instead of just the prettiest girl in school. And then a few months later, Stiles had cut her off along with everybody else when he disappeared into the foster system. Even though he wanted to help her, he knew he couldn't. Beacon Hills had left him behind months earlier and Stiles wasn’t going back to it, or anyone in it. Stiles had Derek. He just suddenly wished he could bring Lydia with them.

Daniel helped Carson stow the bag he had brought before he settled on the bench near Carter. Carson checked that Stiles and Derek were alright before going up front to lecture Sheppard about taking risks while flying and John dismissed them with a nod and a "Yeah, yeah, I know, Carson." The doctor, however, didn't seem to believe him and leaned against the wall behind Jim’s chair to supervise the flight.

"Somebody gonna page Teyla and Ronon and tell them to get their asses in here?" Sheppard asked from up front. "I'd do it, but _I_ don't have a _radio_..."

Stiles could practically hear McKay roll his eyes. “The _Jumper_ has one, you hardheaded _walnut_.”

*~*~*

After the last month, the ship under Sheppard’s hands was like remembering how to breathe. What was left of the problems of the last day faded to background, leaving just the annoying ache from his shoulder and face, and a few dulled bruises. John could think, without the wall of static, and he consciously played across the familiar ship controls, checking every system he could ask about, politely requesting to fly, and being graciously rewarded with balanced acceleration and smooth, gliding turns through the open playing field of space.

“Hope everyone got breakfast,” John announced as the ship left the protection of the Daedalus. “This is gonna be a long flight.”

“No freakin’ problem, man,” replied Sandburg behind him.

“I might need-” began Rodney.

“MREs in the back, buddy,” said John. “You'll be fine.”

He saw Rodney nod acceptance and settle back in the copilot’s chair to get comfortable. He was farther away than John wanted him to be just then, but John could live with it. He tracked the familiar heartbeat and tried not to get too distracted by the shiny objects out on the ship’s horizon line. Just to test his focus, apparently, Ronon stepped forward from the back of the Jumper and thwacked Rodney in the shoulder with a PowerBar. Rodney hadn’t heard him, so he startled, but John had felt the Satedan’s approach and just smiled at it. Ronon clapped him on the shoulder.

“There ya go,” he said before he went back to his spot behind the wide-eyed newbies crowding the front. He had seen his share of planets.

“Cool. Thanks,” John tossed off at his second since Rodney was still glaring at Ronon for startling him. Someday the man would figure out that the regular application of manners actually went a long way toward not getting pranked on their team. Out of the Daedalus’ docking bay, Sheppard took a long sweep out into nothing before swinging the Jumper around to line the Daedalus up in their view-screen, with Earth just below it, glowing her cheerful blue and white.

“Show off,” Rodney muttered under his breath as everyone around him in the forward compartment was having to take a moment to remember how to breathe as they took in the sight.

“Damn right,” replied Sheppard, staring out at the big ship’s silhouette, pretty damn close to happy at the moment.

“This can’t be real,” he heard the snappy Miss Lydia say quietly. It sounded like she had maybe dropped down a few pegs. John smiled to himself and weaved the Jumper under the Daedalus and toward the planet. He saw the bright _snap_! when he called up the cloak and had to pause for a moment.

“Tell me you saw that,” he said to Rodney.

“Saw what?”

“I saw it! What was that?” asked Stiles. John glanced back to see the kid leaning over the back of Sandburg’s chair, taking in as much as he could out the window. Ellison nodded when John looked to him.

“Light or energy pulse of some kind,” Jim said. John nodded.

“That’s what I saw. Reckon it was the cloak.”

“This thing has a _cloak_?” blurted Stiles, with Lydia echoing softly. John let Rodney field that one and concentrated on slowing their descent lower into the atmosphere. The cloak could handle Earth’s human sensors, but he didn’t like to argue with physics without the shield.

“Anybody wanna knock a foreign country off their bucket list?” Sheppard asked. He pointed to the far corner of the window. “Australia’s over there. Waves are going off around now...”

“Colonel Sheppard, we’re expected back at the Sentinel Project,” Carter chimed in from the back.

“I didn’t say we _wouldn’t_ get there,” John replied easily.

“No side stops,” said Sam.

“Yes ma’am,” Sheppard said, switching smoothly back into the rank and file despite the freedom of the Jumper.

“Ohmygod,” Stiles said, a quiet complaint. Apparently he was frustrated by the order, too, but John didn’t say anything. Orders were orders. It was still fun showing the new guys what they had signed on to. Too bad his commanding officer wasn’t going to let him kidnap the Jumper.

The ride was over far too soon for Sheppard, but he followed orders and set the Puddle Jumper down in a barely-big enough clearing near the Project campus. He would have no trouble getting the Jumper out of there, and if Caldwell had sent somebody too green to do it, then the Jumper could stay right where it was until it was time to go home. Nobody said anything about his parking job, so John powered down the engines and popped the back gate.

“Why didn’t you put it down on the helicopter pad?” Stiles asked, leaning out over the center console to look around at the trees.

“I don’t want to find out what happens when somebody tries to put a chopper down on a Jumper,” John replied with a shrug. “Pretty sure the Jumper would win, but-”

Stiles seemed to remember the bit about the ship being cloaked then and dodged around Lydia and Derek to run outside.

“Ohmygod. You guys gotta see this!” the teen yelled only seconds later from outside the craft.

“He does understand the entire purpose of the cloak, right?” Rodney asked on a sigh. Sheppard grinned at him, then watched out the window as Stiles ran around to the front to try to look inside. John started to worry when the kid went to touch the clear window - which may or may not have cooled from the trip through the upper atmosphere yet - but Stiles’ senses seemed to save him even though he couldn’t see the ship and his hand only hovered a foot away before he backed quickly away.

“So. Can we go?” Rodney asked, turning away from the window to ignore the kids exploring in the woods. John still leaned comfortably back in the chair, facing Rodney and the center console. The Jumper had cleared out, aside from the Major who still sat at the rear, waiting to take the ship home to the Daedalus. John was in no hurry to give it back.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“ _I_ think there’s a perfectly good Sentinel-proof room with our names on it, and we’re sitting _out here_ , wasting it,” replied Rodney. John arched an eyebrow as he considered the man’s very valid point.

“I like your thinking, Rodney. We should go.”

It wasn’t exactly a race back to the dorm after that, but John noticed Rodney did put hustle into the effort.

*~*~*

“Where did you learn to do that thing in the shower, anyway?” Rodney asked, perched on the edge of the bed and tying up the laces on the boots. He wasn’t used to boots and it showed.

“What- oh. My ex-wife. Works good on busy schedules,” John replied, distracted. He fussed with his dog tags and dug a clean shirt out of his bag. Rodney blinked up at him, looking somehow surprised, then red-faced looked back to his boots.

“Huh. Remind me to send her a thank you card.”

Sheppard hadn’t been expecting that and choked on a laugh. He paused in shrugging into his shirt just to lean down to tease for a kiss. “Really? That's almost a compliment, Rodney.”

Rodney stood up to meet him, changing John’s plans quickly. The light tease was suddenly a much more intense press of lips and tangle of tongues than John had prepared for, with his arms effectively tied by the shirt he had failed to get into. Rodney caught his belt to keep John from overbalancing and quite happily had control for the moment.

It wasn’t until they came up for air that John realized the face-time didn’t short-out his central nervous system like it had been all week. And it hadn’t hit him in the shower, either. John stood under his own power, no walls or doors for the assist. He smiled broadly at Rodney. He’d tell him about it later. Maybe give him a heart attack first and pick a fight with Ronon... then he could get Teyla, too.

“Go shave. You’re starting to look like the bite took,” Rodney said, scrubbing his hand over the stubble on John’s jaw.

Oh yeah. John was gonna get him for that.

But he reached up and checked his face for himself before grumbling and tossing his shirt on the bed to go shave. It had been a few days since he had bothered. When he got in the bathroom, he checked the mirror and saw his own face for the first time in twenty four hours and maybe understood what had left Rodney so wrapped up and tense. Two long red stripes went down his face just in from the hairline above his left ear down the line of his cheek and another along his jaw. So there was a reason his face hurt.

“Fuck me. These things are gonna heal, right?” he blurted. He turned enough to check the bite on his shoulder, seeing the half-moon punctures of teeth and fangs, as well as dragged lines that matched his face. Rodney didn’t like the question, because his heartbeat sped up, and he stayed hidden away in the other room for another minute. John scrunched his face and then set to work trying to clean up the few days of scruff that was making him look wolfy.

As he finished up, Rodney appeared in the doorway, looking put together and his usual irritable at being left waiting, even if it was for something he had requested. John caught his eye in the mirror and nodded as he finished. “Better?”

Rodney took that as the invitation it was and moved into the room to stand just behind him, at his shoulder. He caught John’s chin and did a touch-check, running the back of his fingers whisper-soft across his jaw before he nodded.

“It’ll do,” he decided. He tucked up behind John and wrapped arms around his waist, his lips pressed against John’s shoulder and his hands wandering quite freely along his ribs and chest. John leaned back, grinning smug at him in the mirror. Rodney didn’t seem to be catching on to the fact that what he was doing had been just short of impossible two days ago without John buckling to the floor. It should have been something Rodney noticed, should have been something the guy would be all over after the way he had been treading so carefully since they started up.

But Rodney wasn’t quite back to himself after the morning’s near-miss, and John wasn’t exactly great at fixing things when he broke them. He had already tried the idea he thought might work, and it got some pretty high praise considering Rodney was Rodney, but there was still a banked anger behind the blue eyes John didn’t know what to do with.

There was a knock on the door - Ronon from the pounding of it - and Rodney startled. He tightened his arms and swayed to move John away from the sound without letting go. He settled down just as quickly and John watched him recover, the smile fading. Rodney let him go and mumbled something into his shoulder about civilized people and clothes, and John figured that was his hint to get civilized before Ronon beat down the door. He grabbed his shirt on the way to the door and had himself dressed before he followed Rodney out.

As they walked downstairs, Ronon openly stared at his face. “Shit, Sheppard.”

John waved it off. “The ladies love the scars. I’m fine.”

Rodney’s expression darkened and John frowned at his own joke, setting a hand to Rodney’s back in silent apology.

“This guy's another story, I guess,” he added quietly, tilting his head toward Rodney as he glanced back at Ronon.

“Where are we going?” Rodney asked, changing the topic.

“Lunch. Training,” replied Ronon. “Hale’s working with Dr. Jackson, so we’re sparring.”

“Cool,” said John. He slapped Ronon’s shoulder. “Just don’t kill me. Please. Met my close-call quota for the year already.”

John expected some complaint from Rodney but the man kept quiet. That couldn’t be good.

*~*~*

Rodney took his time with lunch. He was in no hurry to watch John fail at sparring after the last twenty-four hours. He didn't want to sit through another zone out for at least a month after the morning’s seizures.

If anyone at all actually were to bother to ask McKay what he wanted, though, nobody would like it, probably definitely not John, because Rodney wanted to lock him in their soundproof bedroom and not let him leave until he was healed and zone out-free for life. The solution would result in many other issues, for many other people, but it would keep Rodney from seeing John get hurt again, and as a helpful bonus, it would prevent him from getting yelled at whenever John did get hurt. Because obviously _that_ was productive.

People whined at him to eat faster, but Rodney was used to ignoring low-level annoyances. John was the one who ruined his plans by physically stealing his food and carrying it away with him. Rodney was apparently expected to maintain his appetite while watching violence. Rodney happened to glance down and see the drab-colored, baggy pants he wore and gave up; stomaching violence was a military thing, and he was going to have to get used to it.

He didn't _want_ to, though, and the panic attack it threatened was likely to cause problems if John caught sense of it. So Rodney swallowed it down, snatched his food away from his Sentinel, and retreated to a corner of the gym to eat and ignore the others. The Lt. Colonel stared after him, a funny look on his face that Rodney wasn't in a mood to puzzle out, but then Ronon was making taunting noises about telling Carson that Sheppard was skipping out on warm ups. So John followed Ronon on a jog around the building to warm up. And Rodney scowled at his sandwich and kept to himself.

That part was easy to do because everyone was otherwise focused on the two werewolves of their acquaintance as Derek tried to teach Daniel how to control his moods through fighting. What could possibly go wrong, encouraging a new, untested werewolf into a fight. Around Sentinels, who they now knew were going to reject the bite because of the ATA. Everything about it screamed _Bad Idea_ and Rodney felt himself losing the grip he had on the panic.

There was a loud _crack_! of a body hitting the mats and Rodney physically startled, jumping in his slouch over his food. He looked up to see Daniel splayed out some ten feet from Derek, no longer in the contained circle outline on the mat that marked off the fighting area. Rodney didn’t want to think about exactly how he had gotten so far out of the circle to land on his face; the amount of necessary force was daunting.

“Wasn’t expecting that,” said Daniel slowly, the quiet “ _Oww_...” following like some kind of afterthought.

"Oh _come on_ , that didn't hurt," said Stiles.

“Get up,” said Derek, speaking quick like an order. “Do it again. Get your heart rate up.”

“What if I tried to keep it low, instead?” Daniel asked, ever the scientist. “Worked on the control...”

“That’s part of it, but you can’t control what you haven’t experienced. Until you can tap into it, use the shift when you need it and not when you can’t resist it, then control isn’t possible,” replied Derek.

“Come on, Daniel... He taught a cancer patient how to do this,” chimed in Stiles from the sidelines. “She was a teenager. If she could figure it out, you can.”

“Werewolves get cancer?” Daniel asked. He was on his feet, and looked relaxed, surprised even.

“No, werewolves _cure_ cancer,” said Stiles. That sounded overly simplistic and Rodney scoffed, annoyed. He stood up, collected his tablet and plate of remaining half-sandwich and crisps, and headed for the door. Teyla looked up at him as he passed.

“Rodney?” she asked, the _is something wrong?_ going unsaid for the obvious rhetorical nature of it.

“I have things I need to be doing,” he said, quietly. “Can’t think here.”

Of course, it had caught the attention of the others in the room and Stiles looked over at him from where he still stood already halfway across the room away. “But Sheppard’s going to need you in here.”

“Then someone can find me in the lab when he does. Just don’t let anybody _kill him_ again and he’ll be fine,” said Rodney, tone sharper than it probably needed to be. Rodney was out the door and heading down the hall after that. He mostly knew the way out of the building Ronon had led them into and had no problems dodging other Sentinel and Guide teams in the halls.

Rodney hit the sidewalk around the time that Sheppard and Ronon were coming back from a run. It was clear the Satedan had won the race and John looked ragged. Rodney tried to walk faster, a hopeless attempt not to be noticed. John caught up easily.

“McKay?”

Rodney stopped even though he really didn’t want to. He motioned vaguely toward the small lab building down the hill. “Going to the lab. I’ll... I’ll be there if you need me.”

“You okay?” John pressed. And Rodney decided not to lie so he shrugged and turned to walk away.

“I’ll be in the labs.”

John started to follow but stopped short, letting him go.

*~*~*


	36. Chapter 36

**Earth: Marin County, California**

The gym was at least half the floor of one of the bigger buildings on the Sentinel Project’s campus. It had weights and a few machines, and windows along one whole wall, with all the same ‘Sentinel proofing’ that made the buildings quiet and peaceful and less annoying as Stiles’ senses were picking up on everything more. The floors of the sections of the room without machines were all lined in mats, with painted lines to mark off sparring boundaries for multiple teams to share the space at once. But the sign on the door said it was reserved for Dr. Sandburg’s team, so they had it to themselves.

Sandburg had said it was an afternoon to play catch-up on paperwork that had hit them with the chaos the day before, so the gym was theirs, and they should stay there and work on what they could until Blair or Jim got back. That meant sparring for Sheppard, Ronon, and Teyla, and trying to get Daniel to wolf out on purpose for Derek and Stiles.

Stiles felt better than he had in weeks, maybe months. He felt awake and alert, and the ups and downs of his senses were a weird trip but he was getting used to the headache. He kept going for his jacket to use as a shield against the chill of the open room, but he wasn’t actually cold. It was just that the air was randomly cold, and a jacket kept that more consistent. Lydia hadn’t been officially told to leave yet, and she sat on a bench along the window with Teyla, so she kept asking if Stiles was getting sick or something. It was in the ‘or something’ category, but Stiles didn’t want to explain it. He didn’t know how to. He should probably read the book someday.

The gym offered plenty of room for Derek to try to get Daniel to work with claws at least, but the guy was afraid of himself. Derek wouldn’t push him, but Stiles didn’t know if it was because he figured out that being an asshole to Erica and Boyd hadn’t worked out in the end, or if he was afraid of scaring off Sheppard’s team. It left them in a weird place, the new guys to the pack, giving orders to a nerdy guy in military fatigues who didn’t want to follow orders at all. The best Stiles could offer was to sit on the sidelines and try to help with his smart mouth, but Daniel was pretty near impossible to piss off with snark. It, in general, wasn’t going well.

Colonel Sheppard and Ronon showed up for a minute, checking in with them and dropping Rodney off before they went to warm up. Something was up, because the mood in the room felt physically different when they walked in, and Sheppard and McKay didn’t exactly look happy.

When John left, Stiles moved to stand closer to the corner bench Rodney had claimed, realizing after the fact that he had done so without knowing quite why. John and Ronon would be back, and Rodney was in no danger that Stiles could protect him from anyway. But he still kept between Rodney and the two friendly werewolves like he stood guard. Guarding against what, who the hell knew, but Stiles had done it. Stiles scratched at his shaggy hair - he needed a haircut, badly, after months ignoring things that required asking for money from adults - and tried to stay focused on pissing off the new werewolf without actually pissing anybody off.

Stiles had been hyper-focused on Daniel and Derek when Rodney left his bench and he caught on late. The scientist was grumpy and busy, so Stiles didn’t argue. He noticed when Lydia left the room a minute later and got annoyed at himself for being so easily distracted, his attention caught and held one way or another without his conscious choice. Every little sound, every shift in the air, any weird smell could send him off chasing it down and losing track of whatever he had been trying to do in the first place. He was supposed to be helping, but he couldn’t stay on one train of thought long enough. Stiles gave up and moved to sit on the bench near Teyla.

When Sheppard came back, the man looked like he had caught Rodney’s bad mood. He took stock of the room as he walked in, wrapping his left wrist in tape to reinforce the canvas and metal brace he wore.

“Where’s Ellison and Sandburg?” the Colonel asked.

“Blair said they had to file paperwork and write reports, as we did not stay on campus yesterday,” Teyla said. “They will be in their office until the task is done and then will find us. Though, they did request we stay on campus in order to be found.”

Sheppard nodded. “I guess we’ll be in here. Or the labs. Maybe.”

“You ready?” Ronon asked.

“No sticks,” came the reply. “Knife.”

“John. I don’t think that is the wisest course,” began Teyla, but John shrugged it off.

“I’m fine, Teyla. My wrist can’t take the sticks is all. Ronon’s not gonna skewer me,” said Sheppard.

“It isn’t your wrist I’m worried about,” replied Teyla. The Colonel smiled and tossed his sunglasses to the bench. Then he moved out to the center of one of the mats.

“It’s all I’m worried about, for once,” he replied. He looked to Ronon. “Ready when you are.”

Ronon exchanged a look with Teyla before he shrugged and followed Sheppard out onto the mats. Stiles watched, jaw slack, as Ronon tossed a knife to the Colonel. The same guy who had been near dead only a little over six hours earlier. John caught it and flipped it, getting used to the weight, folding it back along his wrist over the brace. Teyla wasn’t settled on it and followed them out onto the mats.

“He can do it,” Ronon told her. “I’ve seen it. Stop babying him.”

“Yes, but has he done it recently?” Teyla pressed. The group had drawn the attention of Derek and Daniel, the two dropping their own failed sparring efforts to stand on the outer edge of the sparring box to snoop like Stiles was. Ronnon straightened up and let out a clearly annoyed sigh.

“The senses thing happened in Datura, right?” he asked, looking to Sheppard. The Colonel nodded. Ronon waved Teyla’s attention to the answer. “So, see? He won the fight at the camp with the knife. Sheppard up against two guards, he took them out. That’s recent.”

“That’s well over a month ago, and I _think_ the circumstances are _different_ ,” Teyla said.

“Oh no. Don’t worry about it. I’m still plenty pissed off. At least enough to take him down,” said Sheppard, shaking his head.

“Doubtful,” said Ronon, a smug grin on his face.

“Hey, think positive, Chewie. I gotta win sometime,” replied Sheppard. “Might as well be here and now.”

Teyla still stood in the fighters’ ring to keep the two men from playing with knives around someone who could randomly drop into a coma at any second. “John-”

“Teyla. Back off. It’s an order,” said the Colonel. It was the first time Stiles had seen him pull rank on his friends, and it seemed to cause a shift in the three of them. Teyla nodded once and stepped back, but there was a ridgid hold to her shoulders, and she stood back but in a ready, subtle fight stance of her own. She was watching for trouble. Sheppard nodded his thanks for the acknowledgment and turned his attention to waiting for Ronon to move.

“Uhm, should someone go get Rodney?” asked Daniel from behind the Colonel. Sheppard looked annoyed but tramped it down.

“The first person on my team to talk to Rodney or Carson before I do will be running laps until dinner,” said Sheppard, glancing at Stiles. Stiles had made it very clear that running laps wasn’t his favorite thing, so he figured the threat was mostly aimed at him. Daniel snorted at it though. It wasn’t annoyance that crossed the Colonel’s face then. More like anger, but it was gone fast. He took a step back, half turning to be able to see the men behind him as well as Ronon.

“Alrighty then. Seems like everybody’s gonna have an opinion on how I handle things anymore, so, we’re gonna make something real clear, _right now_ ,” Sheppard said, looking around from face to face to make sure everyone was listening. “The only one on my team who can counter my orders is McKay, and no, he’s not in the room just now. This is still _my_ command. And I _earned_ it, and, whacked senses or not, I’ll take the time to _explain_ that to anyone who wants to get in my face about it.”

There was quiet all around and no one seemed to have any arguments. “Everybody good with that?” he asked anyway. Stiles nodded quickly,

“I’m good,” said Ronon, absolutely immune to the man’s tone and smiling over at Daniel as the troublemaker who had started the problem. Teyla nodded and crossed her arms as she followed the orders to step back from the fight she had been told not to interfere with.

“Of course, Colonel,” she said. John nodded his thanks for it before looking to Daniel. The linguist raised his hands in an appeal for peace.

“That’s not - I thought you were joking is all,” he tried as a defense. It wasn’t working on Sheppard. The Colonel glanced at Ronon and waved him off, then turned away, his back to his opponent as he moved to stand in front of Daniel.

“Well, I wasn’t. I was trying to get folks in line and get on with training. Pretty reasonable, since that’s what we’re on this planet for, I think,” he said. “And we all want to get home. So we train. Right?”

“Sounds reasonable, Colonel,” Daniel agreed, resigned to the call out. Sheppard smiled, a look that seemed about as crazy as when Ronon did it.

“Good. Then you and me, let’s go,” said Sheppard. He tapped the flat of the knife in his hand against Daniel’s chest. “It’ll make everybody feel better to know I’m not picking fights with the biggest guy in the room after nearly cashing it all in this morning.”

Daniel stuttered. “With knives?”

“Why not?” Sheppard shrugged, caught Daniel’s wrist to hold up the splayed fingers. “You’ve got five on each hand. I think you’ll be fine.”

Stiles bit his tongue on objecting to the Colonel's idea, because newbie wolf or not, Daniel was still going to be stronger, with supernaturally built muscles and faster responses. Sentinel could see and hear and smell better than the werewolves, but they didn't have any of the other perks. Maybe Daniel wouldn't go for it.

Daniel waved vaguely toward Derek. “As I was just explaining to Derek, I don’t know how to use the- the. That. And it’s not a Pandora’s box I really want to open up-”

“It’s open, Daniel. We’re stuck with what we got, you and me. And if the SGC was willing to haul my ass across two galaxies to make me work through some headaches, I don’t think they’re going to give two bits about your opinion on the hypothetical status of a Greek box when your stuff can kill you,” replied Colonel Sheppard. “Either you own what happened to you, or it owns you. Which are you gonna settle for?”

"The one where I _don't_ kill people," replied Daniel.

"You don't know how to control the things that cause this," John pointed at the claw marks plainly visible on his own face, but missing from Daniel's. "You _will_ kill people."

Daniel seemed to be listening, he just didn't seem to like his options. Sheppard waited him out before trying again. "Look at it this way. You can either work with the werewolf who knows more than you, or you can spar with me, and we'll see which of us outlasts the other. Most everyone in this room would put their money on that being you."

Daniel seemed like he was going for it. This was a far worse idea than letting John spar with Ronon. But Sheppard wasn’t going to be talked out of it, either. Stiles looked to Derek, seeing his friend his usual impassive behind crossed arms. Rodney wasn't there to make John listen, so they would just have to let it play out.

"Colonel, I'm stronger than you," Daniel said, finding one more excuse to bow out rather than giving Sheppard something he would believe. John reacted fast, hauling back and decking Daniel across the face with his fist. Daniel didn't hit the mats that time, but he stumbled back, surprised more than hurt. Sheppard hadn't quite been expecting the rock wall he had just punched, either, but he shook it off quick enough and didn't seem put off his target by the newsflash.

"And you _heal_ , Daniel. I get it. It's not a fair match. But it's _sparring_. Stop dodging it," said Sheppard. He reached into one of the baggy pockets on his pants and pulled out a knotted bandanna that he had probably used as a face mask. He held it up. "Go a minimum of three rounds. I'll try to take you down. You try to get this off me. _Voila_ , you don't have to worry about hurting me."

Daniel stood warily a few feet away, considering the suggestion. Colonel Sheppard had removed a few more of his excuses. He finally nodded reluctant agreement. John tied the bandanna to a belt loop and got to work keeping it away from Daniel.

And Stiles stared in open shock as Daniel actually started to participate in the fight that Derek hadn't been able to talk him into. It wasn’t a brawl, more like a rough game, but if Sheppard could keep it up long enough maybe it would help. The Colonel didn't have to worry about punches at first, because Daniel Jackson the Linguist Werewolf had a very pacifist agenda. It just meant that Sheppard had to move fast and keep his right side angled away from Daniel.

Like somebody who had been on the wrestling team in a past life, Sheppard stayed low and took Daniel to the mats three times before Daniel started to get pissed off. After that, Daniel did start getting punchy, though he thankfully never went for anything he was likely to break, like a nose. Sheppard started using the knife for more than just a warning, and he got Daniel good whenever the man's hand got too close to the flag.

A few cuts to the arms and Daniel started to realize how quickly he could heal. And how much it _didn't_ hurt. He started getting bolder just as Sheppard started running out of steam. Stiles couldn't tell if Daniel even noticed that John was slowing down.

The look on Daniel's face was familiar though; his prey-drive was up, and John was standing between a werewolf and something he wanted. Stiles had seen that look on Scott's face too many times to be comfortable with it now, and he dropped back from the fight on the mats. He kept Ronon between himself and Daniel because he had seen Ronon take on Derek and knew the man had a better than fighting chance, whereas Stiles would just get bit and die.

Teyla noticed, raised an eyebrow at him, and then looked back to the fight. She tensed up on the edges again, like she was readying to step into the fight. She still had her arms wrapped in bandages from the fight at the bank, same as Ronon, but it probably wouldn't be slowing them down if they had to get involved.

Out on the mats, Sheppard went for another low attack, and Daniel adjusted, kicking his back foot out from under him and shoving into the Colonel's shoulder with the force of a battering ram. Sheppard's knee buckled and he rolled sideways, but Daniel was on him and adjusted easily.

In the next moment, Daniel had claws out and one hand wrapped around John's throat, pinning him to the mat. The move came to a draw because John held the knife against the underside of Daniel's chin to keep him back.

"Danny, back off..." John said with a forced calm and casual appeal to neutrality that Stiles understood well enough. But there was no way it would work on Daniel if it had never worked on Scott. Ronon had moved forward to get involved, but Sheppard raised a hand off the mat to wave him back.

Derek looked on, ready to move, but not coiled enough like he needed to. He was on the other side of the fight from the other spectators, so he had a view of Daniel's face, while all Stiles could see was the man's back. Daniel crouched at John's right side, and he seemed stuck for a moment, before he grabbed the bandanna and tugged it loose. They had gone more than three rounds, and Daniel won the last one.

Sheppard carefully pulled the knife back a little, both hands up slowly to show no threat, and Daniel calmed down. He stood up and backed off. John tossed the knife toward Derek and then held his right hand up to Daniel.

"There we go," he said. Like nothing had happened aside from a good run to leave him absolutely ragged. "So that's how you do that."

Daniel hesitated before helping John to his feet. His hands were still claws, and John winced, but the Colonel rolled with it. When he was standing again, he caught Daniel’s shoulder and stood close, like he wasn't afraid of getting clawed, and met Daniel eye to eye.

"Still good?" Sheppard asked. Daniel nodded.

"Yeah. Thanks... I think," said Daniel. "I'm... still trying to figure out what I... well... _this_." He held up his clawed hand.

"Understandable. Just work on it. Get used to it. We'll get you back through the 'gate without any unnecessary casualties," said John. Daniel shook his head.

"You can't promise that, man."

"Nah, we'll just catch you a wraith. Those assholes don't die. Good practice dummy for the not _killing people_ part," replied John. "But I can guarantee you, you won't be hurting anyone on my ship. So you either work with Derek this week and then you're on your own, or you go back to Atlantis with us. When you know what the triggers are and how to keep your head. You didn’t take me out so I think you'll be okay."

Daniel accepted the amendment with a nod. "Yeah. I can do that."

"Great. I'm... gonna go sit down," said Sheppard, sounding absolutely exhausted as he squeezed Daniel on the shoulder and stepped away. Stiles stared, not quite believing it had settled out without bloodshed. Derek stayed near Daniel, asking if he was okay, trying to talk him through the horror of his hand no longer looking anything at all like his own hand. But the bandaid was ripped off. The next time would be easier. The next step would be easier.

Sheppard rolled his shoulder as he walked over to the bench in front of the window and crashed down on to it. Teyla and Ronon headed for him and Stiles followed. He claimed the other end of the bench so he could keep an eye on Derek and Daniel, but he watched Sheppard do a fist bump with Ronon, and a more light-hearted effort at one with Teyla. Teyla was smiling again, Stiles noticed.

"Okay... nobody else is gonna say it, so I will. That... was the stupidest bad idea I have ever seen work," said Stiles, keeping his voice quiet. Sheppard smiled darkly at that.

"You haven't seen much yet," replied the Colonel. "That... was just a Tuesday."

"He could have killed you _on accident_ , you get that, right?" Stiles insisted. "Like, there's a reason Derek's the one he should spar with."

"I get that. And I have seen what these guys will look like when they get ugly. And I've seen uglier than that. I'm not as dumb as I look, kid," Sheppard replied easily. “If I was gonna get in trouble, I had three other people to get me out of it. That’s how this works.”

“He hit you, like, twice, man,” said Stiles. “I’m just saying, you’re lucky, that’s all. Scott messed me up and he’s, like, half Daniel’s size.”

Sheppard winced and nodded. “Carson’s gonna yell. Might need to avoid him the rest of the day.”

Teyla’s smile flattened quickly and the woman narrowed her eyes. John raised a hand and shook a finger at her. “No. No ratting me out. I’ll deal with it _later_.”

Teyla crossed her arms, her eyebrow arched in a look that Stiles hoped Lydia never learned. “Is that an order?”

“Does it gotta be?” John asked, squinting up at her because he knew the answer.

Teyla hummed just barely loud enough to hear the irritation. Then she turned and headed for the door. “I’ll see you gentlemen at dinner.”

Sheppard thumped his head back against the window behind him a few times. “This is what I get for heading a civilian team.”

*~*~*

Rodney made it to the lab building without incident, only to nearly lose his plate of food startling in surprise at the redheaded shadow he had somehow acquired.

"Dr. McKay? I was- look, could I ask you something?" the teenager asked. Lydia added on a small smile, no longer anywhere near as angry as she had been at the bank, and she wasn't glaring at him from behind Stiles or Derek this time, either. The boldness had traded for something that seemed like confusion. Rodney blinked at her.

"What, are you lost?" he asked. She shook her head quickly.

"No, I followed you. And I saw this place yesterday, with Colonel Carter," she said.

"Huh." Rodney considered it and then mentally shrugged it off. He was distracted, the questions of annoying teenagers the actual last thing on his list of things to waste mental energy on just then. But she had put herself on the list by following him.

"Fine. Ask away. Just walk as you do it," said Rodney, holding the door open to wave her inside. She stepped in quickly and wasted no time on her questions.

"Why is Stiles with you? With your team. It's not just the Sentinel Project. It's your team," she said.

"Well, yes," said Rodney. He was confused before, but now he was stumped. He walked into the middle of the lobby area and paused, too distracted to remember which way to the lab he was most likely to find Carson in. "We found him in the woods looking like somebody had used him for a punching bag. We weren't going to leave him there. And Hale got shot, so they came with us."

"Yes, but they’re better now. They could come home-"

"I'm _sorry_? Did you _see_ the boy?" Rodney blurted. "Well, no, I suppose you didn't. But trust me. No. Sending him back to be beaten and drugged some more was not an option. That was pretty universally agreed upon. If he hadn't wanted to join the team, Blair was going to try to move his case out of state."

"But he hasn't even finished junior year. He barely even started it, so how can he possibly help anyone on a spaceship? He's smart, I mean, he figures things out, but... nothing at _that_ level. And Derek... I mean..." Lydia trailed off. Rodney was bad at reading people, but he was _good_ at arguing, and it didn't sound like the girl was arguing about anything. She was just... very confused. She kept flexing her hands and crossing her palms like she wanted to grab onto something, but there was nothing around to keep her hands occupied.

"They're a Sentinel team. Where one goes, the other goes," replied Rodney. "And to make a long story short, we need more people like him and like John at... our post."

Lydia huffed and rolled her eyes, though she still seemed something like... sad. "I signed the non-disclosure agreements and Colonel Carter has already made it very clear I am not to speak to anyone about Atlantis."

"Well, let's not start with me then," replied Rodney, just short of hissing as the girl just announced Atlantis to the empty lab. He was sure to find enough trouble on his own lately and didn't need the help of escaped national secrets. "Is there a point to this? Or are you just... upset about it? Because I really don't think I'm the best person to help-"

"I want to know why he is on your team because I want to go with him. I want to see the Daedalus again. I want to know if there's room for me, too," said Lydia. It rushed out of her but she didn’t seem excited about it. Rodney blinked at the question, surprised by how simple she thought the world must be to just hop a starship and roadtrip with friends to another galaxy. It seemed remarkably ignorant for somebody who even knew what the Fields Medal was, let alone aspired to it.

"It took me twenty years of military scientific breakthroughs to get to the SGC. It's not something you can short-circuit just to hang out with your friends, I’m- I'm sorry, but that's not how this works," Rodney said.

"Then why _Stiles_?" Lydia said, " _I_ still need my friends if you don't."

"Stiles, like Colonel Sheppard, has the ATA genetic code. It's part of what makes them Sentinel. I could’ve sworn we've been over this," Rodney replied. He frowned and fished the earwig radio out of his pocket to settle over his ear. "Colonel Carter? I believe someone is in need of your expertise..."

"If they're going because of something in their blood, how do I get tested?"

Rodney shook his head and shrugged it off. Testing was Carson’s realm, Rodney just dealt with the data on the other side. "The odds of two of you in the same friend group both possessing the gene are astronomical. And it’s not as simple as just having the gene, we can replicate the gene if we have to. In Stiles' case, it's... it's a confluence of factors, the most prevalent of which is the _strength_ of the gene he naturally possesses."

"Derek's always called him a spark. He can make things work that none of the rest of us can. And he can keep up with the werewolves," said Lydia.

McKay considered the news and nodded, though he didn’t put much stock in the superstitions of people who blamed the supernatural over science. But it could lead to some interesting questions about John and Carson if he could find out more. That was still not what Rodney wanted to spend his time on.

"He has the gene, and for whatever reasons, whether this _spark_ thing or because of the ProX, certain technologies are very reactive to his presence. It's literally as simple as that," said Rodney. "So he's going with us for Sentinel training, and to help with the city. Age and experience are not required for that."

“Required for what? I heard my expertise is needed,” asked Sam’s voice. Rodney looked up, muttering a ‘thank god!’ as he saw the Colonel walk in from the hallway. He pointed his tablet at Lydia.

“Teenage female. Please fix it,” he said quickly. As Carter approached, looking far too amused, Rodney excused himself toward the hallway she had come from. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Carson.”

With the helpful reminder of the direction he needed to go, McKay made a hasty escape as Sam made the standard apologies for the rude scientist. A moment later he was down another hallway and stood in the open door of the computer lab Carson had taken over. The doctor looked up.

“You’re not Samantha,” Carson observed, obnoxiously cheerful as usual. His attention went back to the computer in front of him. “Feelin’ better, Rodney?”

“ _No_ ,” Rodney said, blunt and surprising himself with the honesty. “I need something to do. That’s not watching John zone out into another coma.”

“What?” Carson looked up like he was ready to grab a bag and report to a bloodbath. Rodney put his all but forgotten food down on the nearest desk and blocked the door.

“No. He’s not. He’s fine. He’s supposed to be, anyway. They’re sparring. Teyla and Ronon- _Look_ , I’m just- I don’t want to see it again. Not until I can... shake this morning. That’s all I meant. I can’t be _there_ ,” he said.

Carson’s urgency faded but the concern shifted. He looked Rodney over, then nodded and pointed him toward the chair at the next station. “Aye, that’s understandable. But, I have news on that. So sit. Look.”

Rodney collected his food again and perched on the tall rolling stool next to his friend. Carson pointed his attention to different graphs on the laptop screen. “I might not have had much of an idea on how to help with the Sentinel senses, but I collected more than enough DNA to watch the gene take hold. The Iratus retrovirus was still in his system when you got back from the Datura mission, and I thought nothing of it, to be honest. But I saw something on the Daedalus. It’s possible the virus was interfering with the ProX up until yesterday. The ATA targeted it for removal with the... werewolf interference. I haven’t narrowed down that particular beastie yet. But _this_... We can track.”

Rodney looked at the percentage amounts on the screen, saw the consistent amount in the categories marked as pertaining to Carson's handcrafted retrovirus for every check up John had sat for over the last month. And then the markers were lessened from the night before and entirely gone by the sample drawn after they put John in the command chair. "It's been three months. What took so long to assimilate back into his system? There's Wraith in that, for godssakes. I thought it wasn't supposed to go _dormant_..."

"It wasn’t a tested virus, Rodney. I didn’t know what fully to expect, but I _thought_ it would clear out. Instead, I'd wager now that it has been blocking the ProX, to a degree. This, here-" Carson paused to pull up an image recorded from the Daedalus interface when the command chair had shown Carson the chemical and genetic maps of John’s system in live time. He could point to the actual code that the Daedalus had isolated as problematic. "The chair created an interface with the ATA, like we have with our computers. It identified the problem code. Like you said it could. And through that interface, I was able to instruct the ATA gene, well, more or less, to deal with the problem. The Iratus retrovirus is gone. And, presumably so is the virus from the bite."

Rodney stared, processing the data in front of him. "This... this is amazing," he finally managed. It was a lot more than that. There were some terrifying implications to what Carson had found, too, but Rodney was going to have to do a lot more digging in the archives back on Atlantis with this knowledge in hand. This was just from the chair on the Deadalus. There could be similar applications at the others. He looked away from the screen to Carson then. “So the ATA can edit threats to the system. And it didn’t edit the ProX. It’s not a threat.”

“Not at all, just an adaptation. Perhaps a necessary one at the time the Ancients built everything we’re finding now,” said Carson. “But what I’m thinking we may find is fewer zone outs. From everything I’ve read and heard from Blair and Jim, so many for so long are highly unusual. And they were certainly worse on Atlantis and the Daedalus.”

Rodney nodded. “Without the extra virus interference, right. Because the tech on the ships reacts by proximity. And this-” he pointed at Carson’s data on the laptop screen. “Would suggest the ATA and the tech is in more direct contact than we previously thought. The energy readings we were seeing from the chair were just an amplification of something always there. The ships could be running a constant... _diagnostic_ on him. Through the ATA.”

“He’s certainly always been adamant the city is taking care of him. Perhaps it’s not just an imaginary friend, eh?” Carson asked. “With a high enough percentage of the gene in their systems, they can more or less talk to the computers. Completely unconsciously.”

“The noise,” Rodney realized. Half an idea was shoving to the back of his mind and he started snapping his fingers. “Is the Jumper still here? I need to get to the SGC. We have all those spare parts... Ancient stuff we couldn’t identify...”

“Aye, Samantha was going to be sending along what she could-”

“But we only have a few days-”

“They’re supposed to be here for training, Rodney. The more they’re off campus on errands, the less training they can get in,” Carson pointed out. “Let the Colonel arrange things proper.”

Rodney rolled his eyes and settled reluctantly back onto his chair. “It’s just paperwork and bureaucrats. John’s figuring it out.”

“Aye, but maybe give him a chance to figure it out a few more days without the feedback from the Daedalus?”

“Maybe I can reprogram the radios instead,” muttered Rodney. He turned his attention to his tablet, picking up some chips without thinking as he focused on getting around the noise the Ancient tech created for the Sentinels as it synced up with the ATA. His appetite came back and he hardly noticed.

“I haven’t figured out how to get around the radios problem. The white noise is a potential help, but the pagers would have to be disabled, the tone is a potential problem,” said Carson. “The pitch may be too high for them if they get too close, any feedback could ring too high...”

But Rodney had stopped listening entirely. Stuck in his head as he started chasing ideas on how to interrupt genetic noise without losing the necessary advantages it provided the Sentinel. He tapped ideas into the tablet, did some frequency math, and had to research the current circuits of their comm radios without tearing apart the one he had on him. Things would be a lot easier if they had found equivalent communication technology among the Ancients’ things. Maybe he should get John to ask a Jumper for a radio...

“Carson,” came Teyla’s voice, startling Rodney from his work. McKay looked up so fast he hurt his neck and rubbed at it, annoyed at himself.

“What happened?” he asked quickly. Teyla took a deep sigh, breathing out through her nose like she did when she was frustrated with her stupider teammates.

“Colonel Sheppard got Daniel to partially shift. By challenging him into sparring. He seems fine, but Daniel did hit him a few times. He should probably be checked,” she reported.

“No biting?” Rodney asked. “No zone outs?”

“No. I saw two blows to the chest. And he may have scratches on his neck. I saw no bruising, but I wasn’t there long,” said Teyla. “He was talking and breathing.”

Carson started to stand up but Rodney held up a hand to wave him back into his chair. He kept his attention on Teyla. “Did John _send_ you to get Carson?”

“No. He said he planned to avoid Carson for the rest of the day and I became concerned,” replied Teyla. Rodney scoffed to himself at that, noting Carson rolled his eyes.

“Join the club,” said Rodney, with a look over at Carson and then his watch. “The meeting is held right here, the past half hour or so?”

Teyla raised an eyebrow, confused in her civilized way. Rodney sighed.

“Look, until a month ago, nobody cared if John decided to avoid Carson because he got hurt sparring. Until there was blood involved, you and Ronon wouldn’t make him report in. He’d just show up to dinner and sit there hurting and not say anything about it until I asked. He’s a stubborn mess. Just let him go back to that. The idiot knows how to ask for help. He will.” Rodney hesitated and glanced between them, the uncertainty nagging at the back of his neck where he had given himself whiplash a minute earlier. “I think.”

Carson crossed his arms and looked over at Rodney, the “ _Oh really?_ ” right there on his face but not bothering to be voiced. Teyla looked just as amused and suspicious of Rodney’s hypocritical attempt at reclaiming something normal. The old normal was a distant pipe dream but it was still looking better than comas and zone outs and toxic seizures when Rodney didn’t like anything at all resembling personal emergencies. Hypochondriacs were not cut out for playing caretaker on this Guide stuff.

“Shit,” Rodney grumbled. He picked up his tablet and headed for the door. “I’m just gonna go make sure he’s good. I’ll let you know. You can just... stay here. Yeah. That’s good.”

And Rodney left the lab in more of a hurry than he wanted to admit to. He was relieved to find an empty lobby again, no fussing teenagers to slow him down. In the main building, he had to double check the floor before he got lost, but he made it back to the gym. When he opened the door, John was already staring at it, sitting up on the bench and _looking_ normal. One shoulder was hitched higher than the other though, his right arm tucked close across his lap, telling on Sheppard’s effort at favoring his right side. He was avoiding Carson because he didn’t want to admit he hurt.

But there was worry on his face, too. John had the alert tilt to his head and he tracked Rodney’s every movement as he crossed the floor. Rodney looked over to where Derek and Daniel were still sparring, and he cringed when Derek hit the mats with a growl, but they were across the room and he could deal with it.

“Rodney?” John asked, catching his attention back. Rodney stopped just in front of where John sat on the bench in the window and looked down at him. He had a busted lip that was probably going to smart on him for a few days, but otherwise the bruises and cuts were the same as from that morning. He was conscious, and breathing, and dark hazel eyes were watching Rodney with all sorts of questions he was probably never going to ask. Rodney reminded himself to breathe even though he didn’t want to be standing there.

“Do you really need Carson to check your ribs or were you just smarting off to prank Teyla?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet.

“I wasn’t trying to prank Teyla,” John replied sincerely. “It was just a joke.”

“What about your ribs?” Rodney asked. He shifted how he held the tablet, freeing up his left arm, and John jumped like he expected Rodney to poke at the injured side he had just asked about. Rodney noticed that.

“Ts fine,” grumbled John anyway. Rodney just stared at him. John let him, just ticked his chin up a bit higher and tried to keep his shoulders straight.

“Keep it up,” Rodney replied. “I’m learning your tells.”

John blinked at him, genuine confusion for a moment before it became far too innocent to be sincere. It dragged a frustrated sigh from Rodney before he claimed the end of the bench beside John to sit down. John sat on the bench normally so he could see the sparring match, and Rodney took the edge so he could put his back to John’s side without having to watch the mats. Once he was settled, he felt John lean against him, very carefully, and they kept each other propped up on the padded gym bench. After a minute or so of Rodney staying where he was, he felt John touch a kiss to the back of his neck before setting his chin on Rodney’s shoulder.

“You okay?” he asked, just barely loud enough for Rodney to hear. Rodney nodded automatically.

“I’m figuring it out,” he replied. He hesitated, reluctantly adding, “Just don’t make me watch you get hurt. I’m not a medic. I can’t-”

John moving cut him off, and he was surprised when the man caught his waist for balance before straddling the bench behind Rodney and wrapping him in a hug, draping himself over Rodney’s back with his chin over his shoulder.

“Roger that. You got it, buddy.” said John. Another kiss touched Rodney’s jaw and he felt something melt inside that was probably supposed to be intact and not _mush_ normally but Rodney just leaned back when John tucked his arms across his lap. Rodney went back to work on the tablet in front of the both of them, for once not minding someone snooping literally over his shoulder.

“What’s that?” John asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how to make the Daedalus shut up for you,” replied Rodney. The public display was maybe getting to his pride a little because he added a sarcastic, “Since I have to do everything around here now.”

All the same, he felt John smile with his face so close to Rodney’s, and he heard the huff of laughter.

“Yessir, Colonel, sir,” John muttered at his ear, and Rodney understood then why John had banned the honorifics earlier.

*~*~*


	37. Chapter 37

John caught himself dozing off and figured that was a bad idea while cozied up to Rodney's backside in public. He knew where his team was, with Teyla left at the lab with Carson, and the rest of them off behind him helping Daniel figure out how claws worked, which Ronon seemed to be _enjoying_. And from the sounds of things, Daniel was getting better at trying things Derek instructed him to experiment with. Nobody was paying attention to John and Rodney across the room. But John had latched on trying to make Rodney feel better, and taking a nap on him probably wouldn't do the trick.

Instead he stood up and tried to stretch out the pain in his right side. It was going to bruise though, he knew it, so it was a futile effort. Rodney watched him, cautiously supervising, but he was still trying to ignore the werewolves across the room. John set a hand to his shoulder to pull him up. "Get outta here. Go do nerd stuff. I'm fine."

Rodney didn’t quite seem to believe him on that still, which, _okay, valid point_ , but it was still _missing_ the point. John held up a hand in a scout's salute. "Scouts honor, no more fighting. Go away," he said.

Rodney accepted that and stood up. "I'll tell Carson you'll run it by him if it's not better tomorrow?" he asked.

John rolled his eyes. "Yes, mother."

Rodney looked like he had more to say, but he was somehow learning not to say it. _Who the hell_ was teaching John's scientist things he didn't want him learning? This was frustrating. John had that annoying pins and needles knot running up and down his spine that said there was trouble and Rodney’s name at the front of his mind. He could see the stress on the man’s face and he couldn’t make it better. But it wasn't like John could drop everything and interrogate him every time Rodney McKay was in a crabby mood, because neither of them would ever get anything done. Instead, he met the man's stare and tried to project calm.

"No take-backs, remember? We fix it. Whatever it is," he said. Rodney frowned and nodded.

"I'm working on it," replied Rodney. "Nothing is _broken_. Just... stuck."

With a playful tilt of the head, John smirked at him for that. "Can I help? Need a jump-start or something?"

"Believe it or not, you can't fix everything by making faces at it," Rodney said, the familiar huff of annoyance following it up. John shrugged, undaunted.

"I dunno, man. It's pulled some miracles out of you the last couple years. The proper application of a pout should never be underestimated," he replied. Rodney seemed better than he was when he had walked in the gym, but he still wasn't himself, and it was going to bug the shit out of John until he figured it out. "I'll stick with the classics til I've got more to go on. Means you get the faces, and I tell you to go do science."

"Great. You're expecting _miracles_ from this mess now?"

"Nope, just my McKay," John said, shrugging. "Keeps it simple. The other stuff kinda follows you around."

That seemed to get some traction and Rodney nodded. He was the one who initiated the public display that time, a kiss on the lips and everything right there, all unprofessional in the gym. Rodney turned a little pink for it and John maybe loved it.

"Science now?" he asked. Rodney nodded, muttered something at him about not collecting more injuries, and left the room. John stayed where he was, stared out at the ocean behind the mess of trees around the building. A lot had changed in a month, and even more in just the last week. And it wasn’t like Rodney ever handled change without a shouting match or two when things got weird for him. John figured whatever Rodney's mood was, it had to be related to the control freak in him not knowing which way was up. John knew that was _his_ problem, anyway, but he was adjusting already, again. Whatever it was, John knew Rodney would come around, so he tried to shove it aside.

“Colonel Sheppard?” The quiet greeting came from Carter, who, until her approach, John had forgotten was in the room. Hopefully Rodney hadn’t seen her. He winced slightly and squared his shoulders as he turned to face her. She had only a shadow of her usual smile. That couldn’t be good.

“Colonel... If this is about me pushing Dr. Jackson a little...” he began but stopped as he saw her eyebrows inch up in surprise. It wasn’t about that. He snapped his hands behind his back and cleared his throat. “Nevermind then.”

“Maybe,” she said, and maybe she was amused. But she shook her head. “No, I thought I should tell you. I took Lydia to talk to Dr. Sandburg. She explained to me some symptoms she’s been having that have an odd overlap with the Sentinel syndrome. She’ll likely be tested, too, just as Stiles was.”

That was not anywhere at all on Sheppard’s list of _Good Ideas_. “Are we sure this is legit? She did kinda shove her way into my opp the other day. She’s learned a few things since then, she could use them to sound good,” he said, his voice very quiet because of the Sentinel and his werewolf Guide across the room. “She’s... _persuasive_. And she’s a _kid_.”

“I checked her out, Colonel. She’s a year older than Stiles. I’ve got her on an NDA. And, unlike Stiles, she doesn’t have a police record,” said Carter. That was a _gotcha_. Sheppard hadn’t thought a seventeen year old kid might have a police record to deal with. Well. _Shit_.

“Okay, that’s fair,” he allowed, no less reluctant. “I think I need to have a chat with Stilinski. I’ve been a mite busy this week.”

“Probably a good idea,” agreed Carter, smiling again. “I’ll keep you in the loop on Miss Martin.”

“Oh, she has a last name, very good,” replied Sheppard with appropriate sarcasm. He hesitated, then cringed a little to himself as he asked, “Exactly what’s on that police record?”

“Two restraining orders, and he broke into his school a couple of times,” said Carter. “I’ll email you the file.”

“Yes. Do that. Quick. Please. Ma’am,” Sheppard said, stumbling over his words as he tried to sort out how to handle the situation. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was a combination of problems, certainly. He looked over and saw that their conversation had caught the attention of the accused and nodded. He shifted his attention back to Carter. “Thank you, Colonel. Anything else?”

“I wanted to say thanks for helping Daniel,” Sam said. “This is not... not something my team could have worked with. We wouldn’t have known where to start.”

“And he’s your team. Harder to _bully_ your own guys with _knives_ ,” said Sheppard. Carter nodded. John smiled at her. “Anytime he steps out of line, you know where to find us. If you’ll excuse me, though, I need to go get a straight story out of my new guy.”

The Colonel gave a nod of dismissal and John was moving toward the door. He looked across the room at the kid watching him, waved him over. “Stiles! With me.”

Stiles grudgingly left the sparring match, and John realized suddenly it was Ronon squaring off with Daniel this time. He stopped at the door and caught Derek’s attention.

“Can you handle them?” he asked, because the Satedan and a werewolf was an explosive combination and not one Sheppard would have allowed just yet. Daniel was going to get his ass handed to him. Derek just nodded in response, barely looking away from the fight long enough to acknowledge that John had talked to him.

“Ronon and Derek sparred a few days ago,” said Stiles as he walked up to John. “He’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not him I’m worried about,” replied John. All the same, he opened the door and waved Stiles out. “And that's another thing on the _list_. Because you, apparently, are a _juvenile delinquent_ , so start talking.”

"I don't know what you want to know... my dad was the Sheriff..." Stiles tried.

"Yeah, and I'm beginning to think that's about like saying you're a preacher's kid," replied John. "Kinkiest chick I ever dated in high school was a preacher's kid, so you can get away with _a lot_ behind the right label."

There was a guilty quiet from Stiles as Sheppard led the way through the halls. He had to get his hands on a tablet, and he figured Rodney wouldn't appreciate him stealing the one he had, so it was back to his bag at the dorms.

"Tell me about the restraining orders," John prompted. "And tell me the Brass isn't gonna get their stars all up in supernova knots about them."

Stiles kept pace but his heart rate had jumped. "Okay, so _those_ weren't my fault..."

"That's why we’re talking about 'em," said John. "I have to be responsible for your behavior from here on out, so convince me it's not going to happen again."

"So, like, the first one... like, that was a _joke_. This dispatcher at my dad's office didn't like me calling in... but, I was, like, fourteen, so it was stupid," Stiles offered up. "She hung up on me a couple times in an actual emergency. It sucked."

John figured there was more to it than just the dispatcher not liking Stiles calling in, but it was still on a kid. He could play that one off easy if anyone decided to get annoyed. "Okay... that's one, what about two?"

A step ahead of Sheppard, Stiles slammed a shoulder into the doors going outside. "That was a... okay, so, I kinda stole a police van and we locked Lydia’s boyfriend in it overnight."

Out on the sidewalk, Sheppard caught Stiles arm to make him look at him. "Lydia’s boyfriend," he clarified. Stiles nodded.

"Yeah. His dad's a lawyer. Jackson needed it, but we couldn't tell his dad that, and Jackson's kind of an asshole. So I got the heat for it. Because my dad's the sheriff."

"And was that a werewolf thing?" Sheppard asked.

Stiles shrugged and hedged on the question. "Kind of. He wasn't a wolf then. He was this... other thing and he was killing people, we just couldn't prove it."

Sheppard huffed out a hard breath, frustration banked but distracting. What the hell were _kids_ doing chasing murderous teenagers in that goddamned town? He looked across the parking lot, trying to catch sight of the ocean past the trees as he tried to focus. "Okay... and he _didn't_ kill anyone _because_ you locked him in a van."

"Right."

"But _Lydia’s_ boyfriend," John repeated. "As in the Lydia that has attached herself to your side for the last twenty-four hours so tight that Derek wouldn't even pry her off at the bank."

"Okay, well, yes, _that_ Lydia, but that's- I mean, it's not what it looks like. I might have taken an extra special private _joy_ at getting to lock Jackson up because of that part, but we _only_ did it because he was basically possessed and we couldn’t figure out how to chase it out for another couple weeks. Extenuating circumstances. Had nothing to do with Lydia. Except protecting her."

"So, yeah, that doesn't look great on paper," John concluded on a sigh. There was no getting around that one. "Fine. And the school B and E... that's werewolf stuff?"

"Yeah," Stiles replied. "It wasn't even that bad. I was there for school functions. But Scott wolfed out and broke shit. So we blamed me for it and Dad kinda... just had to clean it up for us. Well, for me."

"It's on _your_ record," John said.

"Juvenile records get sealed," replied Stiles.

"Not everything." John frowned and glanced out at the water again. Then he shook his head and waved Stiles on toward the dorms. "Explain this Scott guy. You're taking a lot of heat for his stuff, and Lydia’s been trying real hard to get you to go back and do it again."

"He's- was- my best friend. But the guy stopped listening to me, and he helped the Argents set up the attack on the station. Gerard wanted Derek, and Scott just basically served him up," said Stiles. The kid had cut back on the volume, not quite as willing to answer the question. But the focus it required for him seemed to cut straight through the ramble. It was a lot like dealing with Rodney; he would chase a dozen different ideas until he got the motivation to focus, and there was some emotion behind the topic of Scott and the Argents and the station that seemed to be holding Stiles’ attention.

Sheppard waited him out because that wasn't the end of the story. And Stiles told him about the Argents taking advantage of the problem with the kanima creature that possessed Lydia’s boyfriend, and the number of officers they lost in one night. The kid had spent half the night paralyzed and the last thing he had seen of his dad was a hunter knocking the sheriff out. The wall of the cell where the sheriff had been locked up was later knocked down by an explosion, crushing someone, the entire city then and still believing the sheriff dead. Which Sheppard knew to be false because Carter had given him a piece of paper earlier that morning with the man's signature on it. And a day later Stiles was locked up in the Argents' basement because they hadn't even gotten what they wanted when they wrecked the Sheriff's station. The kid had just lost his dad and the people the social worker eventually sent him to live with had tortured him looking for werewolves. _What the hell._

"The Alphas said Scott bit my dad and left him at the station, but Derek says not to trust them. He says it doesn't make sense that Scott wouldn't have told him about it the last few months. But Scott _hates_ Derek and Derek _still_ tried to help him, so... he's kind of gullible, too," Stiles said. They were tromping up the stairs of the dorm by then and Sheppard was pretty much done with anyone and anything who might have shown up then and told him he couldn't get Stiles to another galaxy where the only things that tried to kill him would at least be very clearly labeled by a few millennia of evolution or crappy uniforms and a solid hit on a Geiger counter for radiation.

"So, one way or another, Scott's the former best friend who put you in foster care, with the guys who worked you over _and_ tried to kill your boyfriend," observed Sheppard.

"Well, I mean, yeah, but no. I wasn't lying before, Derek wasn't my boyfriend," said Stiles. But his heartbeat was too quick. Sheppard left it alone.

"Guide then. The guy who is currently the only thing standing between you and a group-home conservatorship for the rest of your life, thanks to the orphaned Sentinel thing," John amended. He unlocked the door to his room and walked in, leaving the door open for Stiles to do whatever.

"Yeah, that guy," replied Stiles. He followed Sheppard in and sat heavily on the corner of the barely made bed.

"I'm pretty sure if McKay hadn't stepped up, they would have signed me over to my brother, and that meeting would have gone a lot differently the other day," said Sheppard idly. "Bloodshed would have been involved. Another court-martial, definitely."

Kicking his way around a box of uniforms and a couple of duffel bags, John went to the desk shoved in the corner, where it had been carelessly moved out from under the window when he and Rodney had needed it gone to get the two beds together days earlier. He found the papers Carter had given him that morning and then started digging through his backpack for his tablet. It would have been faster to have stolen Rodney's because John's hadn't been used in days and the battery was probably shot.

“Your room’s a mess, man," Stiles said, looking around like he was bored. John glanced up at him, dryly amused.

“First, it’s not my room, it’s the room where I’m staying. And yes, changes had to be made," he said. Stiles smirked, watching John dig for an electrical plug that would work with Earth electrical ports.

"Right," said the kid. Way too smug. Stiles was still a pain in the ass, John had to give him that. He found the right connection plug and stood up then, grabbing the papers as he went. He looked down at Stiles and waved toward the door.

“And second, you just earned yourself a bed check, Mr. Dancing Queen," he said. Stiles seemed to short-out for a second.

“What?”

John pointed him toward the door again. Dead serious, he said, “You’re seventeen. Your _Guide_ isn’t. Bed check. And those sheets better be hospital corners.”

“They are on _one_ of them," Stiles said. He stood and started moving reluctantly toward his and Derek's room across the lounge area.

"Uh huh," said Sheppard, not impressed. Sheppard let the kid sweat it out as he followed him out, closed his door, and then settled into one of the little lounge-area chairs. Stiles looked back from his door to find John trying to get his tablet to boot up.

“Keep your nose outta my room, I’ll keep mine outta yours. Deal?” John offered. Stiles seemed relieved enough and nodded.

"Are bed checks really a thing?" he asked.

"Depending on how much you guys piss me off, yes," said John. He held up the paper from the seat beside him. "This says, in a roundabout way, that I'm responsible for keeping you alive, once we turn it in. The state says you belong to Derek, Derek and your dad had to sign you over to the Sentinel Project, and the Project’s got you signed on under my team. Which means when we pull the trigger on this stuff, Homeworld clearance beats the state. And I would bet a steak dinner that you and I have very different definitions of what the words _not boyfriends_ mean. So don't go making me worry about... anything weird, that may result in _accidental death_ , and I don't have to be a hardass about crap that's not my business."

Stiles agreed and sat in one of the other chairs. "What do you mean about pulling the trigger? I thought we were already on the team," he said, frowning.

"Far as I'm concerned, sure. And Carter will sign off on it. But there's still paperwork. We bring you and Ellison on under the same deal as McKay or any other contractor. And General O'Neill has to arrange it since I'm not SGC anymore. Which means I don't want you signing anything else until you know what the hell you're signing up for."

"Signing up for spaceships and aliens and a city with computers that think I'm god," reported Stiles, remarkably clear-eyed about it. John stared at him, eyebrows raised.

"Okay... you aren't wrong, in any way, there. Except maybe the bit about Atlantis. She'll let me turn the lights off without getting outta bed like everybody else has to, but I don't think that qualifies as a god-like status," he said.

"Close enough," said Stiles with a shrug. Sheppard got the tablet going and checked his internal email in the hopes Sam had gotten the files to him already.

"There's where you're wrong. Gods are incorporeal and enlightened, which... you are neither. I have _met_ gods, and you are the wrong vibe entirely, man," replied Sheppard. He got the email and perused the court documents on the screen. "And that's the kind of thing that I mean. Some _aliens_ are pretty normal, chill like Teyla and Ronon, and others are literally blood thirsty space vampires that want to feed on your lifesource and age you fifty years in twenty seconds. Like, evil elves or something. And then some of them just look like us and _still_ hate my face, so they are _also_ evil, but at least not as creepy to look at."

Stiles was silent and it was definitely a noticeable oddity so Sheppard glanced back up at him from the tablet in his lap. "No, I'm not kidding."

The kid closed his mouth. "Okay... so... not werewolves and lizard-monsters?"

"No... but probably not as weird looking. Those guys just kill you. Wraith kill you slow, and the queens hack your brain. It's not great," said Sheppard. Skimming the court documents confirmed the story Stiles had given on each of the problems John had asked him about, so he poked through the other documents in the file. Birth certificate, and the death certificates for each of Stiles' parents, and the face-sheet from his dad's military days. That was sobering.

The man pictured on the military file looked a lot like the werewolf from the stairwell, the one that had bitten Daniel. Same sandy hair, and he was just missing fangs and a dislocated jaw. Sheppard figured he would keep that to himself, but it made him feel sick. He bailed on the file.

"So, yeah, Stiles. It's not _all_ spaceships and cool new toys," John said. "It's a lot of boring between here and the city, for one thing. And when we get there, there's still stuff out there that wants to kill us. And we're two galaxies away and have to keep the Wraith from figuring out where we came from. There's this big annoying _responsibility_ to humanity involved with charging out to the borderlands. _And_ aliens."

Stiles sat with that for a minute. He finally gave a nod of acceptance. "Okay. I can deal with that."

"You and Derek kinda seem pretty uniquely situated to deal with it, yeah. I'm maybe a little worried about Sandburg but Ellison says he can handle it," said Sheppard. He set the tablet aside, on the end table next to where it was plugged in. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees and hands clasped as he tried to sort out what he wanted to say. He finally looked back up at the kid.

"Look, I’m not trying to psych you out. This is what my team has to offer. Some cool stuff, some stuff that wants to kill us. And all of it... galaxies away from your _home_. The way things are right now, I'm not sure when we can get back here once they actually clear us to leave,” John said, trying to present it to Stiles as clearly as possible. Then he hesitated.

“I know I promised we would try to help your dad, but we fumbled the first play and it nearly killed two of us,” said Sheppard, somber. “I think if we tried again, I _would_ be court-martialed, and the whole team grounded, here. And that's risking... a lot, for the people back on Atlantis, and the team here. Not to mention, it will be months before I'm cleared to get my hands on the kind of ordnance we'd need to take the Alphas on again. So I may have promised something I can't come through on, and you need to be aware of that, too."

The apology surprised Stiles, based on the look on his face, and he found the floor at John's boots suddenly fascinating. He managed to shrug his shoulders and shook his head.

"Derek said it won’t work anyway. My dad's been with the Alphas too long, so even though, you know, he's still my dad... Deucalion's got too much control. When I tried to get him to come with us, he told me to leave town, leave everybody, and he told Derek to never let me come back. He blocked the door to keep us from being able to get back inside. That's why we had to, you know, ram the car. It was the only way Derek and I could get back in," Stiles said.

Sheppard let that process because he wasn't sure how to help make that one hurt any less. He had gone through his own battles with his dad, but hadn't lost him to any monsters other than greed. His philosophical differences with his dad were a lot different than Stiles' dad, in full werewolf teeth and claws, kicking the kid _out of town_. Stiles was not having a good year, to put it mildly.

"So... I figure you held up your end of the deal," Stiles went on. "You got me back there to see my dad again. And you made sure I got out of the Argents, so I have my stuff back, too. That was a bonus. I figure me and Derek are done with Beacon Hills. He's got, like, his inheritance stashed away up there somewhere, but I don't want him anywhere near anybody to go get it. So we'll just leave, with you, and see where we end up."

"If it's just money, maybe we can get Caldwell to help with that," said Sheppard. If he had been thinking, he wouldn't have said anything; volunteering the Colonel's ship and her transport beam was not a good way to avoid making promises to the kid that he couldn't keep. But they could send Derek and Ronon on a trip to a bank without causing too much noise. In theory. "I mean, it never hurts to ask. Or to get Carter to ask, anyway."

As a side goal of getting the kid to smile, it worked, so John took it as a win. "So. Sounds like Sam can throw paperwork at you when it gets here. I'll, uh, check in with Derek. Same as you. Just to make sure."

"He's kinda busy... but he's as in it as I am. Just don't make him join the military," said Stiles.

"Then don't enlist next year," said Sheppard, grounded a little. "Or _ever_. Problem solved. You'll get the training without having to enlist anyway."

"Train- wait, _military_ training?" Stiles balked a little and John shrugged at it.

"Weapons and tactics and how to follow orders, like, say, -just spit-balling the basics here,- when a commander tells you to bug out, you _bug out_ , not crash a rental through the front lobby of a bank to get back in _,_ " he replied. "That's sorta a _big thing_."

"Oh..."

"Teyla and Ronon come from leadership and military-like backgrounds, so I can trust them to read a situation and know they'll have my back. Anything we get into, we can get out of that way," Sheppard said. "In Beacon Hills, that's your territory, so you made a call. Hell, I told you that you could. But that's not what we're dealing with in Pegasus. If me- _or_ my team- gives you guys an order, I gotta know you're gonna follow it. So... training. Once Blair clears us for it."

"Right," said Stiles.

With Stiles’ story matching up to the evidence at hand, John felt pretty confident that he could make the case to General O'Neill to keep a teenager on his team. John had seen kids take on crazy responsibility out in Pegasus and do okay with what they had, so seventeen and twenty were just random numbers; the kids just hadn't leveled up very far in life experience, which could work in John's favor in terms of helping Atlantis. There was less engraved bullshit to cut through. Assuming O'Neill didn't discharge Sheppard for taking Daniel on a milk run and bringing him back werewolf'd, John could work with this new team.

There was just one potential glitch.

"One more thing," he said, reluctantly getting around to something he didn't want to have to get into at all. "Carter took Lydia in to Blair. She may be getting tested for the ProX."

The kid's whole demeanor changed, from relaxed and listening to a coiled spring ready to jump. "What?"

"Sam said she's got symptoms that overlap, so it sounded not likely. But on the chance she does have it... I think she would be better off training here. Not on Atlantis. And I wanted to be sure you're okay with that," said Sheppard.

"She seemed fine," said Stiles.

"Well, so did you, aside from looking like you'd lost a cage match," said John. "And then we find out you'd been drugged and your system suppressed. This stuff doesn't exactly present visually."

"Yeah... I should check on her," said Stiles.

"Carter didn't seem in a hurry to send her home," replied Sheppard. "And I figured you’d wanna know. So unless you've got anything else you figure I need to know to make a case, you can get outta here."

Stiles was out of the chair like a shot. He paused to mutter a seemingly sincere _thank you_ before running down the stairs. John checked the status of the tablet charging, and found it still had an approximate age left before it would be wireless again, so he popped off a message to Rodney just to be sure his Guide knew where to find him. Then John stood and headed for his bedroom. If a _teenager_ was going to call him out on a messy room, he was going to have to fix the problem.

*~*~*

There was something that felt like panic tightening Stiles’ chest, but it was probably just the bruise from the SUV steering wheel. There wasn’t anything to panic about. If Lydia had the ProX, it would work out good for her. She could stay at the Sentinel Project campus and be safe from the werewolves of Beacon Hills. It was only some symptoms, so maybe it was still early. Maybe it would be early enough that she could wait a year and finish school.

He hadn’t thought about school all week. Stiles still had two years left and no idea if he would ever get to finish, and it didn’t really bug him in light of everything else he had been through over the last six months, but Lydia had _Plans_. The Sentinel zone out factor would derail them. And she would need a Guide to enter the program. Stiles dismissed the thought that Jackson Whittemore could help her, Definitely not Allison, but it wasn’t exactly something Stiles would be able to have a say in. Maybe he could call in Danny.

Stiles made himself slow down and breathe. He was getting ahead of himself, and there was no need to be running. Blair had helped him, and all he knew then was that Stiles was a messed up kid, so he would help Lydia. Sure, she was a _different kind_ of messed up, but that just seemed like the kind of guy Sandburg was because of the whole teacher-vibe. Lydia would be fine. It would be okay.

But Stiles was anxious. Everything was very much on the surface for him, right at the front of his mind. Talking with John about the things that had upended his life dragged them out of the mental bookcases where he locked everything up and just kicked the dust up on him. He wasn’t paying attention to anything in particular other than getting to the main building and Blair’s office and he could still remember the weird, bitter smell that had hung on his dad’s jacket the day before. Everything was just _right there_. It was easier to worry about Lydia.

The fact that he walked right into the edge of the door as he opened it and somehow didn’t feel it at all got Stiles’ attention back to the present. He had to get his focus back or he was going to hurt himself. He dodged out of the way of a Sentinel team that was leaving the building and reached out to touch the wall. It was textured and soundproofed, just like the dorms, and the floor was the same well-worn wood. He remembered listening to Derek’s heartbeat the last few days and the calm it brought with it. It was how he had been getting to sleep at night. And now, because he was in a soundproof building, on the first floor, when Derek was somewhere on the third floor, he couldn’t hear it. That _sucked_.

Stiles at least convinced himself that there was no need to run to get where he was going and he tried to figure out how to hold off the panic as he went. He tried to find something else to smell on the air, trying to get around the memory of his dad, and tried to remember what he had scented on the trapped air in the Jumper a few hours earlier, sandwiched between Derek and Lydia. Derek smelled like himself, with the kick of blood and gun smoke and that weird popcorn smell from his jacket, and Lydia's perfumes had faded away to almost nothing, and for some reason all Stiles could remember was that she smelled... scared. That wasn't helpful because he was already stressed out, for one thing, and for another entirely, how the hell did _fear_ have a _smell_? That was not what Stiles wanted to be thinking about just then.

So Stiles tried for something else. Anything else. He looked around the hallway and tried to find something to focus on. There were a few people around, Guides whispering at Sentinel like they were in a library or something, some walking by and others just stopped to chat because they had nowhere else to be just then.

They were whispering, but as Stiles' focus slipped, they got loud. And he finally caught scents of things that weren't fear, but he didn't know what they were. It was a mix, and layers, and some of it was deodorant and some of it was perfume, and some of it was sharp and some sweet... he could taste lavender and that was concerning because he didn't know what the smell tasted like until that moment.

The wall under his fingers was lined in something, it was painted but it was cloth-like under the paint, and he could feel the fibers, feel the plastic-sheen of the seal over the layers. He could smell plastic, too, and wanted to gag on the taste in his mouth, but he didn't, just kept focusing on the tiny grid shapes imprinting into his palm.

He could see the pale wood floor under his shoes, worn down to different colors depending on where the traffic moved most over the years. It had started out dark and had worn lighter, but the finish reflected white-blue light from the doorways and the wall sconces along the hall. Somebody's muddy boot print stood out in stark contrast to the blonde stripes in the wood under the shine.

Stiles was aware of the brightness of the room around him and the waving, rolling, echoing sounds everywhere. It was like the ocean, but it was louder, not right, too much static. Someone was breathing, way too fast, but they were far away.

"All they need is some _stupid_ gene-" came a familiar voice, warped, a little too much reverb, but Lydia.

"That's not the case, Lydia, I promise you. Sixty percent of the people on this campus have the _stupid gene_ , alright? It's okay. Trust me, they're not handing out invites to anyone else, so it's not the gene," said someone else, also distorted. _Blair_? Blair. Lydia was with Blair.

That’s where Stiles was going... but it occurred to him that he wasn't moving. He couldn't move. His fingers were rooted to the long-ago dried paint on the wall, his shoes were stuck behind the line of the dirt outline of somebody's boot. He felt like he was drowning. And falling. How the hell could he do both at once?

Suddenly there was a loud screeching scream that echoed all around Stiles. He thought it was Derek's name. The shout went on forever, and it warbled into the sound of a heartbeat. Panicked breathing came through the sound with the heartbeat. The shouting stopped, but the heartbeat stayed loud and got louder. Voices started saying his name, over and over and the bright room clouded from shadows, with nothing in focus.

The heartbeat was Derek's. Stiles relaxed into the sound of it, and then the feel of it, thumping against his back. Someone touched his face. Derek?

"Stiles?"

_Yep_ , Derek. Stiles closed his eyes. And then he realized he couldn't breathe, hadn’t been breathing, and he startled. His eyes opened and everything was still bright, but he saw faces, Derek's right above him. He gasped for breath and Derek helped him sit up better, arms wrapped around him. Every sense was triggered and set to loud, spiking and dropping, and Stiles wrenched his eyes closed again and tried to burrow in against Derek until he could make everything quiet down to the level of the sound and feel of Derek's heartbeat.

Stiles squinted his eyes open after that, still trying to remember how to breathe. He managed. Derek touched his face again, dragged his thumb over Stiles' forehead and down his jaw, and Stiles followed it until he was certain he understood where reality had settled in.

"Stiles? What happened?" Derek asked. Stiles shook his head as he sat up. He was on the floor, near the wall, and Derek sat behind him, not in a hurry to make Stiles move.

"The walls are soundproof," Stiles said. It sounded stupid, even to just say it out loud. "I... couldn't hear you. And I panicked."

Derek pressed a kiss to the side of his face and closed him in a tighter hug. "Don't do that."

Stiles nodded. He stayed still against Derek but looked around, realizing that there were others gathered around. Blair and Lydia both kneeling not far away, Ellison standing behind Blair. Teyla, Daniel and Sam next to him. Sheppard crouched just behind Derek.

_Oh shit_. Stiles looked to Blair.

"Was that a-" His voice trailed off, but Blair and Ellison got the point and both of them nodded.

"You zoned out for a solid few minutes, man," said Blair. "Welcome back."

*~*~*


	38. Chapter 38

Tucked away in the labs, Rodney and Carson had missed the excitement of the youngest Sentinel on the Project's campus collapsing in a zone.

Of course, Rodney stayed in the lab still when Carson was called away to observe an emergency in the nursing station. Observe only, he said, none of their team had been involved, Carson had been assured. Rodney put it out of mind and had ten minutes of blessed quiet because the Sentinel Project’s scientists had already left for the day.

Rodney wasn’t hiding but was rather intently working, when Blair marched a pack of teenagers into the room. A shaky looking Stiles followed after Sandburg and Lydia, with Derek on his heels, and John bringing up the rear. Lydia looked like she had already gone on a crying jag, and probably wasn't very far from another one. Rodney looked to John and was a little surprised when the Colonel left the others to stand at Rodney's side and lean into his space.

"Hey," John said to Rodney, his voice impossibly quiet. Across the room, Blair perched Lydia in a chair and started talking her through the kind of testing that was going to be required. It was all data, _yada yada_. Rodney ignored them and studied John.

"You know, the irony here is that you've gotten five times quieter since all this started, and feeling like I can hardly hear you is going to drive me insane," Rodney observed. John leaned a hip against the desk and raised an eyebrow at Rodney for it. The scientist nodded, perhaps overemphasizing for the sake of argument, but John liked to hear him argue anyway. "I mean it. Between you and Teyla and Elizabeth, at this rate, I'll be asking everyone to repeat themselves for eighty-percent of every conversation."

"I said _hello_ , Rodney," replied John, the corner of his mouth dangerously close to tugging up to a grin.

"I'm just suggesting we make plans for learning sign language at some point in the future," said Rodney. "Or, you know, you could _speak up_. Whichever is most convenient."

"Sign language it is," said John, and neither one of them had a thought in their minds toward learning a new language. John stood in Rodney's space and tracked the room, and Rodney did a poor job at pretending to be preoccupied by the laptop in front of him. He looked up at John, asked quietly if everyone was okay.

"Well... maybe?" replied John. "Probably. Let's go with that."

“I zoned out,” Stiles offered up. He wasn’t that far away in the small computer lab and was apparently not in the mood to worry about John’s hearing, so Rodney heard him fine. “And when I fell, I guess Lydia kinda _took out_ half the hallway when she screamed for Derek.”

Rodney blinked at the news. “That’s where Carson went?”

“That’s where Carson went,” said John with a nod.

“Problem with soundproof hallways is they still echo,” said Blair. He handed Lydia a swab that looked like a cotton lollipop and told her to let it sit against the inside of her cheek for a minute. Lydia sat up a little straighter and composed herself before accepting it. Blair leaned back against the desk behind him and crossed his arms to wait. “So we’ve got four Sentinel in the infirmary and Lindsay’s trying to figure out why they haven’t gotten their hearing or sight back yet.”

Lydia cringed. Stiles looked just as guilty as the girl did. Lydia Martin was some kind of anti-Sentinel weapon, all on her own. Which required testing. And thus, Blair the not-a-scientist took over the geneticists' lab again, even though it was after hours and his scientists had gone home. Rodney was concerned for the kids but mildly impressed with the anthropologist at the helm, if he was honest, which he had no plans to be about the matter.

“She didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Stiles said quickly. “She was just... loud.”

“That was _more_ than loud,” said Blair, shaking his head. “And with the other stuff she said she’s been experiencing, I’ve got a good idea who to send her to for help on this. It’s not her imagination. After what I heard, _no way_.”

Lydia looked up at him sharply, almost said something, but Blair mimed at her to keep the swab where it was. “Look, it’s gonna sound crazy, but we’ve got numbers on it. So we’ll just see if the ProX is present. Then I’ll get you the info. I don’t want to be wrong and say something. It wouldn’t help.”

“Is it within the Project?” asked Sheppard.

“Alexandria, yeah,” said Blair. “With the ones we’ve gotten in, I think two have gone on to be feds, I’m not sure on the rest. We don’t see it often, because we have the four-out-of-five senses requirement, so it takes something pretty big to break through the screening process. And, _fun fact_ , those situations are the only instances we’ve seen of the ProX being generationally handed down.”

All gloved up like an expert, Sandburg took the swab from Lydia then and protected the sample before moving on to the next test. Rodney was better about his odd mood of the day than he had been even an hour earlier, but he still diverted his entire attention away from anything he knew to involve germs and blood, and tried to refocus on the laptop.

"So what is it then?" Stiles insisted.

"Complicated," replied Blair, talking as he collected a pin-prick blood sample. "Lydia has described selectively enhanced hearing and vision. Self-medicating with wine would indicate to me also enhanced taste, otherwise I expect pills would have been involved instead."

Rodney looked up at that, surprised a girl as put-together as Lydia would have access to the wine to self-medicate with. Stiles' jaw had gone slack at the casual mention.

"She's obviously fine," Blair pointed out before either of them could say anything. "And if we figure out the full range and get her help controlling it, self-medication won't be necessary. So that was three, right? Hearing, vision, taste. I'm betting her fourth qualifying sense is what you'd call the sixth. And as I told her, there's a pretty deep range on the stuff she was describing to me. It is off the perceivable spectrum for you and Jim and John, say. I can't measure it here. We're not set up for it. So if I can squeak her by on four enhanced senses and active ProX, we can get her set up at the facility in Alexandria."

"So she's a Sentinel," said Stiles.

"Not exactly. It's... well, it's different manifestations of the same genetic code, I guess, but there's more to it."

"When did this stuff start?" Stiles asked Lydia. She shook her head and gave a slight shrug of her shoulders.

"Over the summer. You were already gone. And I couldn't tell Ally," said Lydia. "And Derek wouldn’t give me your number."

"I told him not to. I can't break Scott's face. I didn't want him showing up again," replied Stiles. Lydia frowned at him.

"I don't think he did it, Stiles."

"Did what? Help the hunters blow up the station? Or bite my dad?" Stiles asked, tone hard.

"I don't think he bit your dad. We know he helped Gerard. That's not... I just meant your dad," said Lydia.

"That's enough," said John, surprising Rodney. The kids all looked at the Colonel, like maybe they had forgotten he was there. John still stood leaned against Rodney’s desk, his arms crossed over his chest, but he untucked his hand to point a finger between the two friends. "It's been a hard day. You panicked your way into a zone out twenty minutes ago. Let's not go down that particular road again for a while yet."

"Derek's here, I'm okay," said Stiles.

" _Hey_ , we're not security blankets," Rodney pointed out. "He's here, but you can still keep yourself out of trouble."

"Right," added Sheppard, awkwardly trying to back something Rodney realized belatedly had been worded badly. "The whatsit Ellison was talking about. _Biofeedback_. You can still pay attention to how you're breathing. If I could hear you were having trouble from here, you should be feeling it."

Stiles looked to Blair as though he needed confirmation on that, which was fully fair, considering it was John who had said it, and his track record on zone outs had likely set world records.

"Oh, boy, here we go," Sandburg said, looking caught off guard by the pop quiz topic. He took a deep breath of his own, and then spent the next half an hour more or less in a roundabout way explaining that _no_ , Guides were not security blankets, and if Stiles wanted to actually get back to trusting his own biofeedback levels, he would need a lot more practice with his senses, both alongside and away from Derek.

"John didn't have _Rodney_ for the first month, he had an _oxygen mask_ and the Daedalus," Blair reminded them. "And he’s having to retrain his senses all over again, after a month of doing it this other way. Just manhandling Derek whenever things get rocky will do the same thing, Stiles. You'll train yourself to rely on him instead of your senses. There's a lot of reasons that's a bad idea."

"For instance, he's still human and entirely allowed his autonomy," added Rodney. His attention was mostly on his computer screen, but he felt John look down at him where he still stood beside him at the desk.

"Werewolf," cut in Lydia, quietly.

"Human," corrected Stiles, dragging a little.

At that point, Blair had been multitasking between their discussion and the computers. He read off a few things in various screens before he turned toward Lydia.

"How's _banshee_ hit you?" he asked, forcing everyone off the Sentinel and Guide rails entirely.

"Excuse me?" Lydia asked, her voice pitched higher than absolutely necessary, to Rodney's hearing. John must have agreed because he backed up a step and rested a hand at Rodney's back.

"Prelim tests show ProX is active. The rest are still running, but I'm good with this," said Blair.

"So she's a _Sentinel_ ," said Stiles, because he was obviously not keeping up great just then.

"No, doubtful," said Blair. "Same gene, different manifestations, remember? This one doesn't impact all senses, and she has to use some sounds in order to tap into the full range. That's why they went with calling them _Banshee_ instead of just classifying different levels of Sentinel. That's what that scream was, she was trying to _hear_. If she were trained, she would have been able to hear other things in greater detail, using the sound from her scream as sort of, like, an amplifier."

Lydia clapped a hand over her mouth and looked about like she never wanted to speak again, let alone scream.

"When she screamed, I could hear Derek," Stiles said. Blair nodded.

"He was already on the stairs by then, she had hardly stopped screaming before he showed up," said Blair. "So that's actually really good, man. You were instinctively able to filter in a zone. Used one sound to block the others and amplify what you were looking for. You're quick."

"I didn't know what I was doing," Stiles pointed out.

"Neither did Lydia, but it was still effective," replied Blair.

"I sent _four people_ to emergency medical care!" Lydia said, very unhappy at Blair's choice in words. The man set a hand to her shoulder and crouched so she didn't have to look up at him.

"And that wasn't your fault. You just don't know what your senses are dragging up. Like the zone outs, it's a kind of an overload. Your scream was kind of... your system was trying to create an environment where you could hear things normally, process what was going on, because you were scared. Those hallways were _not_ built for how _your senses_ process the world, so this place is not natural to you. It looked like Stiles had just had a stroke on the other end of the hall and you were worried, you just reacted."

"But how do I make it _not_ happen? I want it to _stop_ ," said Lydia.

"I've got a friend back east who can help. She's got four people she's working with right now, so she'll have the room. With some online classes, you won't even have to miss school while you figure this stuff out," Blair said, making the promise as someone well acquainted with how his strange pseudo-academic world worked.

"So she'll be in the program, just another section?" John asked.

"Sort of. We don't have the full numbers on banshee yet," said Blair, looking back over his shoulder at them. "It's rare. So it's treated sort of like an elective option. She's not restricted by legislation like you guys are. The goal for my friend Cassie's Banshee is to help them stay invisible, because people with their sensitivity were, once upon a time, burned as witches or locked up in asylums. The idea is to control the senses to avoid that, not advertise it like we had to with you guys."

Rodney was beginning to understand why Blair had said it wasn't possible to just disable the ProX gene. It was tied to the senses in ways someone like Carson or himself wouldn't even think to suspect. Things that were supposed as supernaturally inspired could be physically explained in that one flip of the genetic switch. And the connection between the ATA and the ProX would only complicate it further. Rodney had no intention of switching from studying the galaxy to instead devote his time to the realm of genetics, it wouldn't do any good, with the amount of things he would have to learn, and the amount of blood he would have to work with, theoretically or not. No, it wasn't his realm, it was voodoo and guesswork and he couldn’t do it. But it was an unknown they needed to have someone working on.

And for all of Rodney’s negative feelings toward the Sentinel Project, it at least had the military backing to have people looking into it. They just needed better people on it who were smart enough to get somewhere with it. From what Rodney had seen so far, their research had stagnated years ago. General O'Neill had moved the Sentinel Project under Homeworld Security once the link between ATA and ProX had been established three years earlier and they had made no real advances since. O’Neill knew it was sensitive and important. Maybe they could petition him for new geneticists.

Rodney remembered John asking him to leave the gene alone then. It had a very effective chill on the mental energy he put into the issue after, and Rodney frowned at his computer screen. John wasn't the genius in their little equation; the gene was important, and Rodney was smart enough to know it was too important to stick on a shelf because things were comfortable for them now. Unknowns were dangerous.

Thankfully Blair had things in his office to better walk Lydia through her version of the ProX activation and he herded the kids back out of the room the same as they had entered it. The difference of course being that John still stood beside Rodney as the door closed. The lab was happily quiet again, but John was staring at him, and being very _loud_ about it without saying anything. Rodney glanced up at him, not sure if he wanted to know what was going on in the man's head just then. There was definitely something happening up there, the tension coming off the Colonel like wind off a storm; not harsh but impossible not to see.

"What?" he finally muttered. John's lean turned into a proper sit on the desk, and he even very intentionally moved the computer a few inches to the side to catch Rodney's attention more fully.

"You are an autonomous security blanket, huh?" he asked. Rodney leaned back in his chair, waved idly toward the place where the kids no longer stood across the room.

"Come on! He's just gonna use Derek as a shield or something. Not even going to try to figure it out on his own," said Rodney.

"Well, aside from the part where that's not our business, what they gotta do..." John began slowly. He motioned between them, the bright blue of his tattoo dancing to draw more attention to his hand on his thigh. "Is that what you think is up here? That's why you're... weird, today?"

"No," said Rodney quickly. He had to look away at the computer screen, desperate for the distraction, and John set his hand on it and shut the screen down to remove it. "Okay, maybe."

"Rodney..."

"I'm still trying to figure this out, John. Okay? I sat there for twelve hours last night. And _all_ I could do was sit. And worry. And get yelled at. And stress out. Anxiety is a thing, you know? When something goes wrong, I’m the guy who’s supposed to fix it, and I couldn’t, not _one thing_ I could do. And even Carson-” Rodney broke off. Carson had snapped at him because he was tired and stressed and just as confused as Rodney was by everything. But Rodney had still been in the blast zone and couldn't shake it.

“Look, I’m not saying I’m done with it or something. It’s not broken. But this... it’s not one way. You can’t just... touch me and make everything better for your senses and then _nothing else_ happens. There’s these fucking annoying consequences. Like me being _deathly_ afraid you’ll be hurt and end up in a coma where nobody can help you. Because _I_ couldn’t figure this stuff out. The one goddamned thing in two universes that I can’t get sorted is how to keep you breathing. That’s a lot, man. It really is.”

" _I_ don't expect you to fix everything," John said. "It just... kinda _happens_ that you do."

"I can't fix broken bones and- and _werewolf_ bites," Rodney replied, bitter about it. From his perch on the desk, John swung his boot and kicked him lightly in the shin.

"Who's idea was it to put me in the chair, asshole?" he asked mildly. "Carson had tapped out."

Rodney blinked at him, surprised. "What? How do you-"

"I was there for twelve hours, too. I _told_ you that," said John. "I know where you were. And you did make it better. I just couldn't tell you that. Didn't wanna fuck up the report after Caldwell bitched at you."

Rodney frowned. "I gotta get this thing built," he said, tapping at the laptop and trying to open it again. John just put his hand on it to keep it closed.

" _This first_."

"It's still your thing," Rodney replied, "I fail to see the difference."

"Difference is, I'm checking on _you_ , 'cuz I happen to be fine just now," said John, the hard edge to his tone not sounding exactly ' _fine_ ', and there was plenty of visible proof to the contrary on his face alone. Rodney could write a list of injuries he had found earlier that had only been added to by a fight with a werewolf.

"I could be working on something actually _useful_ ," Rodney insisted, rather than mention the list.

"Look, this isn't going away, Rodney-"

"Neither is the Daedalus. Until _you're_ on it. So, I need to get this thing built before that happens," said Rodney. "It'll get things back to normal faster."

" _I_ can figure out the Daedalus-"

"Yeah? Before or after Caldwell tosses another _Lieutenant Colonel McKay_ in my face?" Rodney asked, tugging at the open front of the camouflage jacket he wore. "I've literally got a thousand things more productive to my life than learning Air Force regulations and codes and policies for the next three weeks. And that's nothing to the simple fact that I don't want to. These are your colors, and I'll respect _that_ , but they’re- well, they're not mine, and it’s going to be shoved in _my face_."

John stared at him, surprised and confused maybe, but not apparently mad at the frustrated rant. "What’s it matter? We go off world with the Marines all the time-"

" _No_ , I go off world with _you_ ," Rodney corrected him. "And with _Teyla_ and with _Ronon_. The others are just there. Normally they're there because without them, one or the other of us would come home shot full of holes, and I prefer that _not_ happen."

"And you wear a uniform-"

"Yes, _Atlantis_ colors."

John sat up from his slouch at the edge of the desk, hands loose on his thighs rather than wrapped to strangle the front edge. He kicked his heel against the support post, making noise to make noise that even Rodney noticed and was annoyed by. But he was, in general, annoyed. And John was doing the face with the thinking happening behind it, and then he licked his lower lip just that tiny bit and Rodney was frustrated all over again because how could that annoying man be constantly risking life and beautiful limb for stupid things...

"Okay." John's announcement startled Rodney out of his mood, particularly because it was accompanied by the man grabbing the laptop off the desk. Rodney blinked and dove forward to claim it back but John had already unplugged it.

"Hey! _Stop taking_ my things-"

"Shut up, Rodney. _Where_ am I gonna take your things? You _own_ all of my shit," John returned, but he didn't sound as angry as he should have. He was already off the desk and halfway to the door before Rodney caught up that they were leaving.

"That doesn't mean I know where it is," replied Rodney lamely. John stopped in the doorway to wait for him, and there was a definite glare for the comment. Rodney reached for his computer but John kept it out of reach and ushered him down the hallway.

"Where are we going?"

"To find my address book so I can tell you where the house is you bought," replied John easily.

"I didn't-"

"Yes, you did. You spent twelve hours in the infirmary last night. Add that to the last two years of saving my ass in space, I'm sure the hourly rate works out," said John.

"That- Look, that math doesn't work out because I can mention just as many times it went the other way," said Rodney, hesitant at the intersection of confusion and simple logic presented by John's unreadable mood. "Because we were usually together when there were lives needing saving- a little fuzzier on who was at fault in each instance but it must balance out."

"Always, Rodney. Nearly _always_ together," John replied. "You and Ford were like oil and water, and Lorne's too by the book for you. You aren't _allowed_ off world without AR-1."

"Oh."

John paused long enough to hold the outside door open for Rodney to leave the building. He still didn't look angry, but there was a stubborn set to his jaw, and he still wouldn't give Rodney his laptop back.

"So what _that_ means," John continued as they resumed walking, and Rodney could only guess they were headed for the dorm. "Is that nearly every mission that went toward the hours and regs I had to hit for them to kick me up from _Major Sheppard_ to _Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard_ was a mission you were invested in, up to your neck. And _between the two of us_ , on nearly every mission, we got our team home. We agreed on that?"

Rodney slowed down a pace as he considered it and John held up to wait, staying right in step with Rodney as he talked.

"We, _together_ , for two years now, held our city up against Wraith and storms and Genii and Ancient ghosts in every machine from stem to stern. And, hey, smack there in the middle of it, I got a _promotion_ and I'm _still_ not at your paygrade, if we wanna be honest. But I've got a little silver oak leaf pinned to my uniform and I'm the ranking military officer of a ship. In another _galaxy_. So we did that. And I'm okay with that."

Rodney stopped outright in the middle of the sidewalk to stare at him and John just caught his elbow to keep him walking.

"So you follow? If I gotta share my little silver badges with somebody, it's gonna be _you_ ," he said, his voice still even and quiet.

Rodney nodded and kept walking, struck silent by the man's words. His brain chased off on a thought experiment, wondering if he would so easily share if someone offered him the Nobel for the work he had done at Atlantis. It wasn't in his nature at all. And it wasn’t in John's either, he knew; the man had been angry as Rodney had ever seen him when he had to sign everything over. They were still in step as they climbed the stairs to their room and Rodney hardly noticed.

John unlocked their door and then stepped aside, door open in front of them. "In."

It was an order, and Rodney was fully curious now, his mind settled that John was rationalizing rather than telling the truth. The man was on another mission to make Rodney feel better, which was nice, but it couldn't be the full truth. John was good at saying exactly what he thought would get him what he wanted and making it look like an accident. And Rodney was good at going along with it. That was just how they worked.

"Gimmie the jacket," John said, another order as he followed Rodney in. The door was shut, the laptop was put on the desk- and Rodney realized the desk had been moved. The whole room had been moved around. The two beds were still stuffed together, now neatly in the middle of the room, with clear walking space on either side and the blankets arranged and straightened as crisp as they could be when they were too narrow for a double bed. The desk sat behind the door, their backpacks under it, the box of fatigues in the closet, and Rodney's duffel bags hanging from the shelf above it.

"I thought you were in the gym," Rodney said, further knocked off balance.

"I was. And then I was in here until Lydia gave me a goddamned heart attack because I had the window open," John complained. He had pulled his backpack up onto the desk and was digging into it. "I still want the jacket."

"Oh. Right." Rodney shrugged out of the heavy overshirt with his name on the patch on his chest. He handed it to John only to have it be tossed on the bed. John handed him a dark gray shirt in trade and tugged at the hem of the shirt Rodney was wearing in a hint.

"So that. It's mine. You wear that," John said, looking Rodney square on the eye. "You wanted my colors. There you go."

Rodney frowned at the shirt in his hand, confused because he didn't see the point in trading a black t-shirt for a dark gray shirt that looked like it had started out black once upon a time. He held it up and caught a whiff of it. It hadn't even been washed since it was last worn and smelled very much like John. Not terrible, but... definitely John.

"It needs washed," he observed, but still held onto it. John rolled his eyes and pulled at Rodney's shirt in earnest to strip him out of it.

"You smell like me anyway," he said. Rodney allowed it and then climbed into the borrowed shirt and looked down at his front. It was the shirt John slept in, with the black silkscreened vampire panda barely visible on the faded material. It was likely not regulation standard either. But it would go unnoticed under the top layer, another silent rebellion from a man who had apparently grown up bucking whatever system he found himself in.

John was already working on the jacket. Unbuttoning the cuffs at the wrists, rolling them up part way and latching the strap to keep them rolled to the button hole halfway up. Taking one of the patches off the shoulders. He went to the desk and pulled the patch off the front of his backpack. His Atlantis patch went on the jacket shoulder that no longer had the US flag.

"I'll fix it up the rest of the way later," John said as he handed it back to Rodney. "Gotta borrow Teyla’s kit for it."

The jacket still said US Air Force over the front pocket, but the US flag was in John's hand and being tucked into his pants pocket. Rodney reached for the jacket and shrugged into it.

"It'll keep people off your back until we get back to Atlantis colors," said John. "Till then. My colors. Uncle Sam can fuck off, far as you’re concerned."

“Well, not exactly, I’ll keep my paychecks, thank you,” said Rodney, quietly trying to sort out if bucking the rules helped him balance it out in his head.

“Me too,” said John. He still stood in front of Rodney, close, but he crossed his arms. “The whole reason we’re doing this is to keep my job, and I get that. Keep the team together, get back to Atlantis. That job sometimes means I have to do stupid shit that could get me killed. And the zone outs are... they’re part of it. I think I’m starting to figure it out, okay? I just gotta have more than a week to get any good at it.”

Rodney nodded his understanding. “I told Teyla off for tracking down Carson,” he offered. “They didn’t before. It bothered me.”

The worried grimace on John’s face eased up and he almost looked surprised. “You - _really_?”

“Yeah. And then I felt sick and had to go check on you myself to make sure Carson didn’t need to show up,” Rodney replied. “I was nauseous. I had to know.”

The brief flicker of amusement disappeared behind something darker that Rodney couldn’t figure out. Not _angry_ , but anger. John unfolded to catch Rodney’s arms, running his hands along his shoulders and down and back up. He pressed a kiss to Rodney’s brow and then rested his forehead to his.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, like it was somehow his fault Rodney was an anxious wreck over stupid things. But then again... Maybe it was. Maybe it was a Guide thing.

“Is that what this is?” Rodney asked, surprised. He caught John’s shirt to get him to look up and met him eye to eye again. “A Guide thing? Not just... I’m not losing it?”

“Jim and I knew when the hunters hit your camp even though we were a mile away... Blair said it would hit him when Jim was in trouble,” John replied, nodding. “Said this was the stuff they did training for.”

“Shit.” Rodney reached out to loop his arms around John’s shoulders and pull him in tight. They were solidly in the realm of things Rodney didn't understand and had no frame of reference for. He could explain anxiety. He couldn't explain it when it was tied to the physical safety of someone else and not his own physiology.

"Hey, hey - maybe it's not the..." John didn't make it very far into the empty reassurance. "Okay, look, let’s check with Sandburg. It's easy to find out. Just ask any time..."

"Strangely enough, I've only ever had to talk to him about you, and I hadn’t planned on that changing," Rodney said, words muffled by his arm.

" _Guide_ thing," John replied. "Not even a genius knows everything. Sometimes you gotta ask for help."

"I'll email him," muttered Rodney. John grumbled about it but Rodney couldn't hear him. And he probably did it on purpose. He set his hands on Rodney’s waist and stepped backwards, either guiding him toward the door or hinting to let go, so Rodney chose _not_ to let go. John grunted at him and tugged on his shirt.

"Damnit, Carson dragged me across two galaxies for this, and _you_ helped," John said, his voice clear just at Rodney's ear. "We'll go talk to the expert, or the next sparring match is you and Ronon. Don't think I won't set it up."

Rodney debated it out in his head before deciding he would ultimately lose that particular battle of wills. He reluctantly let John drag him to Blair Sandburg's office, with its walls of books and strange statues and masks, just to be told the anxiety and nausea - especially where there was anything involving blood - was the Guide's reaction to whatever their Sentinel was going through. It was the mirror effect at work when the Sentinel's senses were too whacked to process the physical stress themselves. Like John's every bruise and bite and busted lip was causing an unnoticed smell that set off alarm klaxons in Rodney's system that shortened his usual fuse.

"Well, how do we go about, uh, _not_ doing that?" John asked, a guilty slump to his shoulders. "The fuse can't get much shorter before he starts yelling. You saw him snapping at the kids earlier."

Blair shrugged. "Well, you can try to medicate, he can learn meditation maybe. Start on training things to stop responding so strong..."

"Alcohol. I heard _alcohol_ ," said John, hopeful as Rodney had ever heard him. Blair wasn't amused.

"I said _medicate_ , not self-medicate. You don't even know how booze will hit you anymore, man. You do _not_ want to risk it if he's already avoiding you."

"Rodney’s not-" John looked over at Rodney then, somewhat wounded by the realization. "Oh."

"Basically it means you have to stop for a while until the pain catches up to you, because right now you're just... sending it to him," Blair told John. "You could handle a busted wrist. But _yesterday_ , maybe you're not doing great with, and you need to pay attention."

"Hey! That was _not_ part of the deal..." said John, very close to growling. " _Nobody_ said anything about _causing_ pain-"

"Well, normally _major injury_ doesn't become an issue in training and we have a few weeks to get that far in classes," Blair replied. "In case you missed the memo, we're all kind of rolling with the punches this week, man."

"So, what, we take the day off?" Rodney asked, somewhat stunned as he processed. He was beginning to understand why the Sentinel had developed a dangerous reputation around the hospitals. John was worked up about Rodney's system picking up on pheromones and was acting like a wolf protecting a fresh meal. And he had been sour and moody all day because John was hurting. The change was drastic and very noticeable and they were so screwed if they didn’t sort this out, fast.

"Well, not take the day off, exactly, but you'll have to take it easy," Blair said. He looked to John. "You should be _feeling_ pain, not dialing it down _that far_. That's not safe."

John scowled at the floor in front of Blair's desk. "The damn bite burns. It's annoying so I've got it down."

Rodney did not even hesitate to backhand his right arm for that. " _I'm_ telling Carson."

John mocked him for it, the scowl fixed on his face. Rodney felt suddenly nauseous and looked around for a place to safely lose his lunch, but it passed. He looked up at Blair, wide eyed and pale, because _what the hell_.

"What?" Blair asked.

"I just- almost-" Talking wasn’t a great idea and Rodney just shut his mouth and hid behind a hand.

Blair looked to John, eyebrow raised. "You just messed with the dials, didn't you?"

" _You_ told me to!"

Blair let out an amused sort of frustrated sigh and shook his head. He waved them up as he stood. "Okay, so, you're stubborn, and you're both done for the day. I'll get with Carson on something for your shoulder. For now, you're both confined to the dorm, and I highly recommend sleep. And there’s this tea you should try, might help..."

At least it wasn't the infirmary again.

*~*~*


	39. Chapter 39

John Sheppard woke up the next morning with a mother of a headache and he hadn’t even been allowed to drink anything but rosehip tea. Which, while good enough as tea went, was not the nice relaxing burn of say, tequila. Not at all. And it didn't even work, since John woke up to pain in his shoulder and face like nothing else. But he could deal with it. He hurt in a few other places that he was just fine with. He just liked it better when he didn't have to deal with the big stuff, and the dial trick was so helpful in at least turning the pain down. He blinked blearily up at the ceiling and silently berated himself for considering it.

One of the things John had learned during his marriage was that he was very good at ending up in the dog house. He was also very good at getting out of it, but it always seemed to work out that the faster he sweet-talked his way out of it, the faster he would wind up back in it. Sex was only an effective patch-job to whatever the problem was, because the _problem_ was usually still there once the afterglow wore off. Which, of course, was where John was now, thinking _really hard_ about ruining the apology he had worked _really hard_ to make perfect a few hours before. Could he mess with the pain dials while Rodney was _asleep_ or would it just give him nightmares?

The thing he did know about his current situation was one he wouldn't admit to anyone: he really shouldn't have picked a fight with a werewolf. Definitely not two of them. Would _not_ be doing that again any time soon.

It didn't help the temptation that doting apology-sex with his sense of touch turned _way up_ was definitely a thing he could get used to on a regular basis. It was a good thing the walls were soundproof in their dorm-pod, though he was worried about the damn door being too thin. But John was considering the wisdom of requesting a move to one of the more uninhabited parts of Atlantis when they got home. He and Rodney used to go out on the NW pier a lot, maybe there was something over that way. John just had to come up with a better excuse to move away from the rest of the military crew than " _I would like more sex, please, and McKay doesn't want his given-name getting around to the rest of the city._ " He could mumble something about Sentinel senses and have Sandburg sign off on it.

John had expected to sleep it off and be under for hours, but his shoulder had other ideas. And if Rodney was feeling like a security blanket, John wasn't going to risk waking him up by touching him. He curled up as close as he could, but the gap between the twin beds was an uncomfortable shoulder-trap. It was still not yet nine am before he gave up, admitted he was awake, and went to shower. No one had come looking for them, so maybe Sandburg meant it when he said they were confined to the dorm.

Rodney woke up a few minutes later and sleepily joined him, which resulted in more fooling around, and then lazy cuddles under the water until the hot water gave up on them. From then on, Rodney was awake, and wanting coffee, and bacon and eggs, and maybe they could make jello, and John had left his laptop charger in the lab and he was going to murder him if someone walked away with it, and also that thing they did last night was definitely happening again at the soonest availability, and Sandburg had said there would be something for his shoulder by now and they should probably get John some more tea. Brain slowed by pain-fog and meds, John just blinked at the unending ramble and tried to get his clothes on before the already-dressed Rodney left the room and forgot to close the door behind him.

At least Rodney was feeling better. John could keep up with that easier than the confused mess of the day before. He noticed, too, that Rodney was apparently on board with John's uniform fix because he was back in the smelly sleep-shirt and hadn’t bothered to button the jacket. Back downstairs, Teyla and Ronon were in the kitchen, so John asked to borrow Teyla’s leather kit and she reached into the big BDU pocket on her thigh and pulled out a small bundle, handed it over.

So as Rodney figured out how to cook himself breakfast after two years of catered meals, with Ronon sitting on the island behind him barely not laughing at him while telling him how not to screw it up, John sewed a patch on Rodney’s jacket. The jacket was done before the bacon was edible, and John couldn't figure out how to get the thicker needles back in their hand-made, secure carrying case so he had to ask for Teyla’s help returning it in the condition he had borrowed it. Then he left the jacket on the back of his chair for Lt. Col. McKay to collect.

Carson showed up around ten am to put John's shoulder out of his misery, offering up some kind of home-blend lotion that smelled like mint, eucalyptus, and lavender, and eggs of all things, but who knew what was actually in it. John made it a point not to ask. His shoulder went blissfully numb when he smeared some of the stuff on it, though, so he even rubbed it into the cuts on his face. The eucalyptus made him sneeze so he would be reconsidering that before trying it near his nose again. Rodney liked it well enough and dabbed it on the healing cut over his forehead, only thinking afterward to ask confirmation that there was no citrus in the mix. (There wasn’t, because Carson was a smart man who did not seem at all surprised that Rodney didn't ask _before_ sharing.)

"So are we still grounded, doc? Or are we allowed to leave our room today?" John asked, a little sniffly from the stuff on his face.

"I'll keep an eye on Rodney. Sam will be by to collect you before long," came the cheerful reply. "If you're up to it, there's a class Blair wants ye in this afternoon, but he's not in the mood to have ye crash on him for pushing too hard, either."

That was surprising and John frowned at the notion that Blair Sandburg had _moods_. The man was the laid-back, roll-with-it type who could joke off anything.

"Something happen in the infirmary?" John asked. Carson nodded.

"Two were released and recovered. One of the lads still can't hear. Another seems to have damaged her eye. If it doesn't clear up, they'll be sent to Alexandria for the team there to monitor," said Carson, unhappy at the report.

"Damn," said Rodney, his good mood dampened significantly. John slouched back in his chair and idly kicked his legs out, his boot camping out behind Rodney's to rest up against his leg.

"So, uh, we don't mess with Banshee, huh?" Rodney asked. John nodded. He remembered being screamed at by a Wraith queen and was suddenly worried it was going to cause permanent problems if it ever happened again.

"I'll start wearing the range glasses in the field," he said, his mind lightyears away from the present. "Not sure how to get around the hearing problem."

"You will have to practice," said Teyla. "Dials down in unknown areas. The rest of us can still hear fine, there's no need to risk it in dangerous environments."

"It's not like anyone expected _Lydia_ to be dangerous," John pointed out. Teyla took his point and nodded. She looked back to Carson.

"What about Stiles? He was exposed. Is he feeling the effects?" she asked. John could have kicked himself for not putting that together himself. Carson just shook his head.

"Dr. Lindsay says he was too zoned in on whatever knocked him down. Apparently they - well, you too, John, - can focus on one particular sound or sensation and block all others. The zone out did that for him and he only would have heard the range of the auditory spectrum that lined up with whatever he was focused on, cuts the damage risk considerably."

John scrunched his nose as he considered it. There was still a lot of stuff he didn't know, capabilities and liabilities, and he didn't know how to access these tricks let alone use them, and it was his own body, damnit. But he hadn't zoned in twenty-four hours, so maybe if he could keep that record going, he could start to learn a few things more than the still unpredictable dial trick.

"Where are the kids now?"

"The two of ye got him worried so Blair's working with them, so they avoid a few of the traps ye found already," said Carson. "And Sam took Lydia home first thing this morning to get her started with the Project business. She obviously can't stay on campus here long."

John leaned forward over the table to lean on his hands and try to knead out the tension headache that threatened. Rodney shifted his legs under the table to trap John's leg between his ankles and it was scary how much it helped.

"Blair thinks you and the lad are operating at a higher level than Ellison and most of the other cases they've seen," Carson said after a beat. John tilted his head to look sideways at the doctor.

"We're _what_ , now?"

"You’re multitasking your senses. Ye zone out on multiple senses at once, which is a mystery to him. Stiles is, too, and he's filtering in a zone. The higher ATA is translated into... well, _more_ , with the ProX," said Carson.

"Pretty sure _I_ said that a few times," muttered John.

"Aye, and we now have two of ye. More data."

"I didn't sign up to be a lab rat," John said. Carson rolled his eyes.

"Colonel, you've been a bloody _lab rat_ since we stepped foot on Atlantis. Nothing worked until you interacted with it, and some of _that_ reached out and bit ye. If there's trouble, you'll find it, and the only way to get ye out of it is trial and error. The damn retrovirus was still in your system until yesterday and I didn't know that would happen. It's _all_ guesswork," said Carson easily, not at all ruffled by the Colonel's warning.

"Voodoo," said Rodney across the table. John's attention turned to the open kitchen door as he heard footsteps and signs of human life on approach outside the room.

"You, my friend, are the most superstitious man I know," replied Carson, looking to Rodney. "The medical realm is still backed by scientific review, and the scientific method is not _voodoo_."

Rodney seemed offended at being called superstitious but he very noticeably did not argue.

"Well, then. Shall we go?" Carson asked. Rodney nodded and started babbling about the project John had made him abandon the night before and why it had to be done before they got back to the Daedalus.

"General O'Neill brought along a box of Ancient artifacts," said Sam Carter as she stopped in the doorway. "They're waiting for you in the lab. Daniel will help."

Rodney looked up at her, his face bright, and then climbed out of his chair. He grabbed his jacket off the back as he went and shrugged into it on the way with his laptop in hand to slow down the progress. John stood up, too, given he had been warned Sam was there to collect him and not Rodney.

"Excellent timing," Rodney said. "I'm looking for something. Like, a communication device. They had to have had them. Maybe they left behind one or two."

He went to meet Carson at the door to go but Sam stood there in their way, one eyebrow raised, and a puzzled sort of smile on her face. Rodney stopped still, confused by whatever he was missing.

"What?" he asked, looking down and patting his sides to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything. Then he saw the patch John had sewn on the left front pocket of the jacket, which was apparently what had caught Sam's attention. Directly on the pocket, under the heavy patch that said US AIR FORCE, John had sewn the Canadian flag patch on with the heavier thread from Teyla’s kit. It wasn’t exactly pretty, but it got the point across. The US flag and Atlantis patches were velcroed on the shoulders, but the red and white maple leaf wasn't going anywhere without a knife.

"Oh," said Rodney. He looked up at Sam. "I didn't know that was there. Sorry?"

Sam reached out and untucked the pocket closing flap from where John had moved it out of the way so the flag showed. "Maybe keep it that way when you're out around the campus. Blair is enough of a bad influence, probably," she said as a suggestion. Rodney nodded. Then he held up a hand to call for a pause.

"Scuse me," he said. Then he turned and walked back to the table, set his laptop down precariously close to the edge. John was about to point out the danger but Rodney was rather fixated on him just then and John couldn't tell if he was about to be decked or kissed. Given the situation, and the audience, John figured he was about to get yelled at, at the very least. In public. With their whole team looking on. And Sam Carter.

Rodney caught his shirt front and tugged, but it wasn't violent. Kissing it was, then. And it wasn’t short and sweet, either. John wasn't sure what to do with his hands and caught at Rodney's side pockets just to hang on as he tried to keep up. _So much for professionals_.

Rodney was the amusing shade of pink when he pulled away. He straightened John's shirt that he had so drastically rumpled right in front. John bit the inside of his cheek as a distraction and started buttoning the jacket for Rodney, mechanically focusing on the feel of buttons under his fingertips instead of the other _touch_ sensations that had lit up. They could at least pretend he was presentable.

"There ya go. Go do science, Mer," John said, quiet. And Rodney apparently heard him because he smiled and turned away to catch his laptop, then followed Carson out the door Sam was no longer blocking. The Colonel stood just inside the kitchen, brows up but a small smile on her face. She waited until Rodney was well out of earshot before she said anything.

"I'll be honest, I was wondering why he hadn’t hit me with any of the obnoxious come ons, this trip," she said. "Can I assume he's over it now?"

John was still trying to get his senses back under control after the massive spike Rodney had just caused and he took a breath, considering. "Uh... I wouldn't. He goes hot and cold. Still new," he managed.

"No, it's _not_ ," said Ronon. Because that was somehow _helpful_. John looked over at the heathen still camped out on the kitchen island with an accusing glare and was just met by a smug smile. It probably said something, though; he was on the team less than a year and apparently knew more than John. Teyla set a hand to John's arm, something that _was_ actually helpful and grounding, and smiled at him too.

"It's really not," she added.

"This is a mutiny, that's what," muttered John, feeling very colorful suddenly under the werewolf stripes across his face. Which just set Ronon laughing to prove it.

Sam coughed politely to catch their attention and waved at the door. "The General's probably waiting, Colonel. We should go catch up."

John took the excuse to run away from the teasing and followed Sam out of the building.

"How's Daniel doing, anyway?" he asked when they were outside.

"Really great, actually. It's... weird," said Sam. John figured he didn't want to know what counted as werewolf _weird_ just then, given the massive amount of _weird_ his own life had been consumed by. They met up with the newly minted werewolf in question at the steps in front of the main building, as he had already left the labs.

"I thought you were helping Rodney?" John asked, mildly concerned his scientist had continued his quest to make life difficult once presented with a box of toys.

"I don't have the gene, so he doesn't need my help," said Daniel, shrugging. "He told me to send Stiles if Blair would clear him."

"God, don't do that right now," said John, scrubbing a hand over his face. "He'll be in there all day and there will be yelling. I'll handle him."

Sam nodded her agreement. She had been in the labs with Rodney, she knew the dangers. Daniel shrugged it off, not about to argue. Sam led the way inside and up to the admin office that John hated so very much. There, they found Jack O'Neill sitting, surrounded by paperwork and looking miserable about it. He looked up as they filed into the room and leaned back in his chair, all too happy to stop working on whatever he was working on. He stood up then and moved to meet them not far from the door.

O’Neill wasn’t standing on ceremony with his own team and went right to Daniel, started patting his shoulders and arms like he was checking for broken parts. Sam caught Sheppard’s attention and nodded him toward the table, leaving Daniel to fend off his boss on his own. John didn’t need to be told twice and cleared quickly out of easy range for what he expected was going to be at least a lecture.

"So, werewolf?" O’Neill asked, still studying Daniel, Because honestly, who would believe a report that said the word ‘werewolf’ anywhere on it. Daniel just nodded, grimace set on his face and threatening to become permanent.

"That's what I'm told," he said. O’Neill didn’t seem sold.

"What exactly is a... ware wolf?" He crossed his arms and intentionally relied on a Midwest accent to feign ignorance of the words coming out of his mouth.

"Uh..." Daniel raised his hand slightly before putting it back in his pocket. He rocked on his heels, uncertain on the direction the interrogation was going. "Me, now."

O’Neill shook his head. "But you look like Daniel. I see no wolf. Just Daniel."

"That's the _wer_ -part, Jack," Daniel said, rolling his eyes. Sheppard would have given a lot to have not been in the room then. O’Neill was playing with Daniel but his heart rate was up and he had that one particularly iron-bitter smell that John had learned to associate with anger over the last month of his nose accidentally getting up in everybody’s hormonal shifts. His new CO was going to murder him, slowly, and John didn’t have the ability to just heal back up like Daniel had graduated up to.

"So what about the other part?” said O’Neill, still dealing with Daniel. “Let me see _that_ part."

Daniel hesitated before shaking his head. "I haven't figured out how to do that yet."

O’Neill actually seemed to like that answer. "Then how do you know it's even a thing? What if it's just... a cult... or something. "

Daniel sighed at the General’s prying. O’Neill crossed his arms, waiting.

" _Yes_?"

Daniel seemed very determined and angry, looked away from Jack’s checking up on him and idly took his hands out of his pockets. He cracked his knuckles and worked his hands for a moment before suddenly there was a shift in the air and Sheppard tuned into a subtle change in scent from their corner. Then Daniel’s hands were reformed into claws with the flick of his fingers, and Jack jumped back from simple surprise at the change. He recovered quick enough and caught Daniel’s wrist to reassure himself the change was really more than some kind of visual trick.

"That would be the wolf part, I take it?" Jack asked, sounding a little shaky compared to the earlier anger. Daniel nodded patiently.

"Yes, Jack." Daniel shook his hand and the claws were back to normal human fingers with short nails and soft pads and Sheppard had to look away because he knew just enough about how human physiology worked to know he had no clue how that was even possible. Jack clapped Daniel on the shoulders again, squeezed like he probably wanted to pull him in for a hug but wouldn’t because there was some outsider snooping in on their team for the meeting. Then Jack stepped back and waved Daniel toward a chair, any chair.

"Very good. Not drug induced,” Jack said as he moved to his chair. Sheppard looked up and saw the frown on O’Neill’s face didn’t match the friendly words. Daniel sat next to John and O’Neill looked between the two of them, and there was definitely an anger there. “Cult-free is the way to be. All that. _What the hell_ am I supposed to do with this, _Daniel_?"

Sheppard sat a little straighter in his seat and tried to be invisible in his black shirt against the black leather of his chair. Daniel, however, wasn’t at all concerned. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and made his pitch.

"Well...” he began carefully. “The one werewolf we know is going to Atlantis, and I think I should go with him..."

Jack shoved at the chair he still stood behind, already shaking his head. "Aw for crying out loud, Daniel! I promised you could go to Atlantis next year. Or the year after that-"

"Maybe," said Daniel. “You said _maybe_.”

"Maybe _counts_!" Jack shook a finger at him for the challenge.

Daniel met the glare flat. “And _then_ you keep blocking it every time I ask Landry.”

“I _said_ maybe,” repeated O’Neill. Daniel rolled his eyes and slumped back in his chair with a put-upon sigh. There was a pretty familiar vibe to the argument for John, and he looked down to study the tabletop rather than wonder about things that simply were not his business in any galaxy whatsoever. But he really needed to get back and check on Rodney and those artifacts.

"He didn't get bit on purpose, Jack,” said Sam with her usual peacekeeper’s patience. “I mean, I wasn't there, but it doesn't seem like something someone would _volunteer_ for."

Daniel raised a hand up off the arm of his chair. "Actually, some do. Those born into it view it as a gift, a new lease on life for the fact that it... comes inherent with healing... and other... things."

O’Neill finally sat himself down in the chair so he wasn’t tempted to roll it into the wall behind him. He scowled over at Daniel. "Sounding like a cult thing again, Danny."

"It's not," said Daniel quickly. Jack raised an eyebrow and rolled his hand in an annoyed wave.

"Except you have to go to _Atlantis_ ," he said. “Funny, that. Considering how many times you’ve asked to go over the past four years, since we started to get that project off the ground.”

Daniel nodded, bearing it out, and he leaned forward on the table again. "Just for training. So I don't accidentally... kill anyone.."

O’Neill’s eyes bugged slightly and then he slumped in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. "This is the worst sales pitch I have _ever_ heard."

Daniel looked to Sheppard for some kind of assist and John floundered. Daniel really was trying to get him killed.

"He won't be cleared for off-world, sir. Not for a few months," John managed. O’Neill looked at him sharply then at Daniel.

"Months? We're talking _months_?"

Daniel nodded. "At least."

O’Neill and Daniel kept up a staring contest that was equal parts glaring match and Sheppard knew he wouldn’t have been able to hold up. Daniel actually seemed to win because O’Neill dropped back in his chair and waved Daniel off. "Fine. Go away."

Daniel tried not to smile about the win but it wasn’t terribly successful. "Sorry, Jack..."

O’Neill glared at him again before making it a point to ignore him entirely. He focused instead on John, leaned back and arms crossed.

"That's gratitude for ya, Sheppard,” he said, the anger cut back to a more professional level, but John knew very well it was still there. And not far below the surface. “I stick my neck out for you and you break up my team. The _rest_ of the way."

"Sir, it's a temporary reassignment and he'll be better for it after training,” Sheppard began, but the anger notched up on the other side of the table and Sheppard mentally declared a full retreat. He pointed the finger at Daniel without shame. “I told him to go with the kids, so this was technically his idea."

“Oh, _please_ ,” muttered Daniel. It seemed to work and O’Neill calmed down. The air seemed to clear and Sheppard let out a breath.

“I’ll believe that,” said O’Neill. He nodded toward Sheppard. "Scuttlebutt is that you were nearly killed by it."

"Not the first time _that’s_ happened," replied Sheppard with a shrug. “Kinda goes with the job description out there.”

O’Neill nodded, allowing the point. "Caldwell doesn't want to let you back on his ship."

Sheppard winced. "McKay’s working on that. He said the Ancient tech creates a feedback loop with the ATA and the ProX and we just have to figure out how to break that."

That was news to Daniel and Carter and they leaned forward like they wanted to ask for details, but O’Neill still had the floor.

"Huh. Can he do it?" the General asked. Sheppard nodded.

"In his sleep, sir. Thankfully he's awake, so it shouldn't take as long," he replied. “And he’s hoping there’s some Ancient artifact in what you brought over that can help him short-cut getting it done.”

“And this will work for the other two?” O’Neill asked.

“I assume so. He hasn’t got much more than theory at this point, but we’ve still got a few days,” replied Sheppard.

O’Neill gave him the side eye for another minute as he weighed the answer. Then he finally looked to the stacks of paper spread out in front of him before he looked up to Sheppard again.

“So. Here’s the situation,” he began. “I got you your Sentinel teams. Both of them. But the only way I could get Sandburg’s case arranged was a five year contract. But it’s a _contract_. Full term, _civilian_ contract. No more ankle monitor bullshit, no more parole agent check ins. He gets a paycheck. They just want a trip back or a check in once a year, as allowed. And I can waive that as needed.”

Sheppard smiled at the news, relaxing a little in his chair. “Thank you, sir.”

O’Neill gave a curt nod. “They want the kid to check in more than that, but those will be monitored calls and paperwork. And the marker has to be done on site here before he leaves.”

Sheppard’s relief faded but he kept the smile plastered in place. “I don’t suppose we could leave a little early and conveniently miss his appointment? He and Hale won’t be joining the military, so the tattoo won’t be _legally_ required-”

“It’s in the Project’s bylaws, enlisting is irrelevant. They go through the program, the Director wants their policies in place even if they don’t know where their agents are,” said O’Neill. “ _Especially_ then, but I couldn’t tell her how much of a worthless fight she was waging there.”

Sheppard nodded, resigned to losing to bureaucratic bullshit. “Fine, but not red. If it doesn’t look friendly and cheerful, _we’re_ the aliens who end up with problems, not the Director.”

“You plan to take this kid out in the field?” O’Neill asked, surprised.

“The thought had crossed my mind that, yes, I’d take my team through the ‘gate,” replied Sheppard. “Eventually.”

“Why?” Jack blurted. “He’s a kid!”

“He’s a kid who’s been dealing with werewolves for the last few years, and who happens to come with a wolf Guide as a veritable shield,” said Sheppard. “We get some credibility as something other than a military op, from some planets, for having a kid with us, and that could get us some better deals in the long run. They’re both smart, they’re a good team, and I know they can take care of themselves when things go sideways.”

“They _both_ have criminal records,” O’Neill pointed out. Sheppard nodded; he had already had that conversation with Stiles and Derek the day before.

“Technically, so do I, sir. And they’re still kids,” said Sheppard. He shrugged. “If they’re gonna be labeled criminals, might as well send them with me and I’ll be my best worst influence.”

Jack smiled at that answer and nodded his acceptance of the logic. “Alright then. We just need signatures from the responsible parties and we’ll get it done.”

_Responsible parties_ , of course, meaning the Guides, and Sheppard shoved the irritation down. He reached out and caught the nearest of the contracts. Nobody said anything as he looked them over, reading every word despite a brain slowed by pain.

John had started out his first attempt at a life in law school, like his dad wanted. Maybe his heart hadn’t been in it, but John could have faked it if he’d had to. And he was just enough done with the Project’s sneaky traps that he wanted to know what he was having his team sign _before_ they signed it. Then, just to be sure it was clear who was responsible for bringing a kid and a teacher into the whole mess of the Pegasus Project, John Sheppard signed on the _Authorizing Lead_ line and left the _Witness_ line for his Guide’s signature.

*~*~*


	40. Chapter 40

There were still two beds in Stiles and Derek's room, but that was mostly only because they hadn't consciously realized they might be allowed to rearrange the furniture. The secondary reason was that Stiles was a beanpole compared to Derek and his stupid muscles, and he could sneak into any space big enough for his head. They had squished into a twin bed at the SGC, even in the infirmary, so they just continued it at the Project campus. It was cozy. And Stiles could get away with being handsy when there was no room to be anything but.

Stiles had tried to make the point that Derek turned into an actual wolf and didn't need a bed to himself, but Sam Carter wasn't comfortable with Lydia staying on campus longer than necessary, so she didn't let Lydia stay in with them and their unused bed. The Colonel made space for her in her own room and then they left first thing in the morning, before anyone else was even awake. Stiles had to say goodbye the night before, which he didn't like. But Lydia had stopped asking him to go back with her. Stiles figured they both understood where each other were coming from, for once. 

But he didn't like it, and Stiles hid in his room after saying goodbye, even though Derek stayed out in the lounge talking to Sheppard for a half an hour after that. The door was open a crack the whole time so Stiles could hear Derek without worrying. Stiles sulked on the bed, waited for Derek to walk in the room, waited longer for him to shower, and then dragged on his arm to make sure Derek didn't wolf-out and disappear on him, too. But it was wasted worry, because Derek was still unsettled by the zone out and wrapped him in a vice-grip of a hug that Stiles didn't escape from until daylight. And that was fine by him, because that was all Stiles wanted just then anyway. He wouldn't have been able to sleep without it; his brain was too loud.

Blair knocked on the door at eight AM and Stiles still didn't want to move, but there was some kind of Guide BroCode or something that mandated Derek not leave the man waiting around outside like a creeper, so Stiles grudgingly woke up when Derek growled at him to do it. 

The only possible upside was that Ellison had breakfast waiting for them downstairs and they weren't going to make Stiles do any dishes. The downside was that they said there was still too much to cover so Stiles and Derek would have enough work to do as it was.

Ellison made Stiles go for a run, with the noticeable absence of Sheppard. When Stiles asked where the Colonel was, Jim shook his head.

"He's not fit for it. Used the dials too much, put his system in distress, so McKay's messed up. They're down for the day," replied Jim.

"Was that supposed to make sense?" Stiles asked, panting as he tried to keep up with the Ranger. "Because it didn't."

"The Colonel has intermittent control of the dials, right. Not great at getting the dials turned down when things are coming at him yet, but once they're down, they're down. So he turned down touch and pain to keep going yesterday, when he shouldn't have," Ellison explained. "Basically, the stress he was putting his system under transferred to McKay, as a high, physical anxiety. And Guides can't turn that stuff off, so McKay was getting sick."

Stiles tripped on his own shoes and nearly sprawled on the pavement but he caught himself and kept moving. 

"Wait- I can make Derek sick?"

"He's gonna know when you're in distress, just like you'll know when he's in trouble," replied Ellison. "Last night, he was already on his way to you before Lydia screamed. He knew you were in trouble. That's some kind of instinct."

Stiles didn’t quite go for it. "Derek _doesn't_ get sick."

"But he knows when you're in trouble," Jim replied. "That's how this works. And if they're stuck in the same room with you, it gets worse on them, because they pick up on physical symptoms. It's not just a nagging anxiety then."

"Oh." Stiles mulled it over as they ran, too out of practice to manage talking and running at once. When they had gone down along the pier and back, Ellison let him off the hook and Stiles had to go change clothes because his shirt smelled like sweat and fish, even though he hadn't gotten near the water, and Stiles couldn't handle it.

Then it was back to Blair's office, where Stiles latched on to Derek until he felt less wobbly. Then Blair and Jim spent the next hour going over what happened when someone got sick, what to do and not to do in a hospital, what to expect when one or the other of them was in trouble or under threat. It was useful to know. And the only reason they were being told about it now, was because Sheppard and McKay had already stumbled into it all in some form or another and if that was how the team was going to go, Blair wanted to get ahead of the surprises and screw-ups. Stiles wanted to beat his aching head into a wall.

"Do you accept constructive criticism?" Derek asked at one point, slouched back in his chair behind his usual mask of indifferent contemplation. Stiles blinked at him, surprised as Blair nodded.

"Sure, whatcha got?" he asked.

"Maybe you should have told Colonel Sheppard about this stuff, like you are telling us," said Derek, shrugging to downplay the cut. " _Before_ Sheppard gets body slammed by werewolves twice in two days. Just a thought."

Blair rolled his eyes, because, really, he should have seen that coming.

"We've had a week, they've had a _month_. Time doesn't work like that," replied Blair. "And also, if their records are anything to go by, they don't work like that."

"What records?" Stiles asked.

"Mission reports. Carter gave us access to a few of them," said Jim.

" _We_ don't have access," replied Stiles, offended.

"You’re not _military_ ," Jim pointed out.

"That's not fair," said Stiles. "We're still on the team. We'll still be in those mission reports. Or something." The look from both of the adults then managed to call out the bullshit whining and Stiles waved his hands. "Okay! But you know what I mean!"

"Do _you_ accept constructive criticism?" Blair replied, grinning at him.

"No," said Stiles quickly, because he was smarter than that.

"He wants to know what was in the stuff about _our_ team that _you_ can read but _we_ can't," Derek said, helpfully spelling it out. It was the _adult_ thing. He was there to bridge the gap between Stiles' grasp of the English language and the adults who forgot how it worked.

And that was how Stiles hijacked at least an hour of time that was supposed to have been spent learning how to not have headaches and painful things happen to him because of his senses and instead turned it into the kind of quality storytelling that could fuel nightmares. Really all it did was add to Stiles' impatience. He wanted to know what else was out there. He wanted to sic a werewolf on a Wraith and see what happened. (But he also wanted to make sure that never _ever_ happened.) He _really_ wanted to fly a Jumper.

In short, his attention span was shot all to hell. "I need coffee," he announced. Blair glanced at his watch.

"Probably lunch, actually." He frowned and glanced over at Jim before looking back at Stiles and Derek. "And after that, we have to hand you over to the Director for a few hours."

"Sheppard said he didn't want us signing anything unless we knew what it was," Stiles said, wary of the plan entirely. "Did somebody tell him about that?"

"As far as I know, he and Rodney have to be there," said Blair. "It's to go over Project requirements. I wanted you in regular classes this afternoon, but the Director got pissy that we went off campus, so..." He mimed an explosion with his hands and quiet sound effects. "This is the fallout. By the books."

Stiles leaned on the arm of his chair, tapping his fingers on the edge. From what Jim and Blair had just said about Sheppard and his team from the mission report stories, by the book wasn't how Sheppard liked to do things.

"Sheppard's gonna get pissed off again, isn't he?" Stiles asked. Blair went wide eyed as Jim winced.

"God, I hope not. That'll set off Rodney, and the Director will find an ax," said Blair.

"Axes would be bad..." said Derek. "Maybe someone should check with them... _before_ the Director gets involved."

Blair nodded, and Jim was already standing to leave. 

  
  
*~*~*  
  


“Okay. So. You’re not working.”

“Excuse me? I got _some_ of them to do stuff,” John was thoroughly offended by the statement and Rodney realized he had said it wrong. He shook his head and waved at the artifacts spread out over the table.

"I don’t mean you- _you_ , I mean the gene. It’s not working. We’ll have to borrow Stiles, see if he has better luck,” Rodney said, clarifying. John frowned at him, the one with the pout on the edges of his eyes that said Rodney had definitely not fixed the accidental insult.

“Okay, fine, but if _I_ can’t get anything working now, how is it going to... do the thing? Say he gets something to work, what’re the odds it will let me or Ellison talk to the Daedalus if it’s not reading off me now?”

“Since when do you care about the odds?” replied Rodney. He had a valid point and Rodney didn’t like it. John shrugged.

“I don’t, but it’s a _thing_ here,” he said. Rodney crossed his arms and stared at the conference table cluttered with thus far largely uncooperative Ancient technology.

“Maybe he just has to activate it,” said Rodney, thinking out loud. “Like you do with half the stuff you touch.”

John narrowed his eyes. “Just how much higher does this kid score on the ATA scale than me?”

Rodney shrugged the question off. “Like point-oh-five. Negligible. But we’ve obviously seen now that there’s more than just the ATA involved here.”

John mirrored Rodney’s stance and there was a full pout on his face when Rodney looked over at him. “Just for the record, I will be very unhappy if my city likes him better than me after all this.”

Rodney rolled his eyes. “She’s a computer. She doesn’t _like_ anybody.”

“One, that’s _wrong_ . And two, you called her a her, so even you know you _lied_ ,” replied John, smug as he backhanded Rodney’s shoulder to declare victory. Rodney started to return the taunt but realized doing so would smack the bite and it ended up being a flailed sort of wave that John just laughed at. John sobered quickly and looked to the door, standing slightly taller and closer to at attention. 

“Who’s here?” Rodney asked, curious. Sheppard raised a sarcastic eyebrow. 

“Oh, _now_ I’m supposed to show off?”

Rodney was glaring at him when the door opened and Sandburg stuck his head inside. He saw who he was looking for apparently because the door opened fully. It was a party affair as Stiles snuck his way in before Blair could, and their individual partners followed like normal adults who weren’t afraid of being locked out of the room. Rodney waved for Stiles’ attention and picked up an artifact that John had earlier learned was some sort of environmental detector. It wasn’t ultimately very useful because even once John had activated it, Rodney couldn’t get the screen to give him any readings. But it would work.

“Hold that,” he instructed, dropping it into Stiles’ hand. On clicked the device and Stiles jumped, not having expected the narrow stripes of light from the crystal-shaped device to expand into a viewscreen. The Ancient text scrolled on the viewer and then flickered, switching to English. Rodney rolled his eyes and pointed accusingly at the device.

“That is not fair,” he said over his shoulder at John. Stiles smirked at it and then held up the device. 

“Happy to report we can breathe the air in here,” he offered. Rodney caught the device from him and, to his surprise, it stayed lit. He turned to show the result to John and watched the man’s grin fade.

“Ha! Maybe we _can_ use this one.” 

“Well, that’s rude,” John muttered. 

Rodney put the device down and went after another one that had looked more promising as small and pocketable and, he hoped, for communications because they had two of them. 

"What... is going on?” asked Ellison. The man seemed very confused as to why Rodney was just handing off things that looked like broken tablets and rocks and crystals that hadn’t quite grown naturally. 

“Ancient stuff,” said John helpfully. “We’re looking for something that works with the ProX.”

“That didn’t before,” clarified Rodney, because that was important. “We couldn’t get any of this stuff to work when we were starting the expedition.” 

“Did you take it to Atlantis?” Sandburg asked. “See if they worked there? Or on the Daedalus?”

Rodney momentarily lost track of what he was doing entirely as Sandburg asked a very, ridiculously simple question. He looked to John, who just shrugged, because of course he wouldn’t have been invested enough to have thought of that option two years earlier. 

“Well, no... We didn’t have the option of taking extra, unnecessary items on the first trip,” said Rodney, recovering. “We’ll... take them back this time.”

“How do you know they’re even belonging to the same civilization?” Blair asked, picking up a tablet-sized pad that looked like a stone because they had yet to activate it. “Maybe the Ancients left them behind because _they_ couldn’t figure them out, either.”

Rodney sighed and rolled his eyes. There was no response from the two devices he had given to Stiles, so he tried taking one and handing it to John, because _communication_ devices may need different parties to _communicate_ with. Yes, he was grasping at straws, but it was science, which meant doing annoyingly unproductive things until something productive made itself known. Unlike the soft-sciences, where they just asked inane questions that no one could possibly answer without a _time machine_. Rather than point any of that out, however, Rodney told John to ask the device to do something.

“Still nothing,” John replied. 

“This is going to take too long,” Rodney said, complaining as he looked at the devices that he would now have to test individually between two ATA ProX holders no less than three times, in two different galaxies. “I’ll just have to hack our radios.”

“For what?”

“Breaking up the- the- Daedalus and the, uh, uh, the ATA feedback,” said Rodney, his mind miles away, galaxies even, because he desperately wanted access to the Ancient’s database to research things he should have thought to research a month earlier and wasn’t smart enough to have paid attention to at the time. Granted, he was mostly drugged on pain medication for two weeks after they got back from the prison planet, but still, he should have paid attention. 

“John, what’s your pain level?” Blair asked, and Rodney startled, looking up from the artifacts then. Blair was eyeing Rodney suspiciously enough and John looked wholly innocent for once, hands up and everything.

“It’s not me,” John said quickly. “I took my medicine and I’ve been slathering that smelly stuff on every hour.”

“Then what’s wrong with Rodney? He’s stuttering...” Blair said. Rodney blinked at him, confused.

“Nothing?” he said. John nodded, patted Rodney on the shoulder.

“ _This_... is his normal. A little crisis-mode, because he won’t believe me that there’s not a deadline, but... normal,” said John. Rodney nodded, only half certain there wasn’t an insult in the report. 

“I’m trying to keep the Daedalus from hacking their brains the whole ride home,” Rodney explained to Blair. “ _I_ see that as a deadline.”

“It’s annoying, but we can live with it if we have to,” John tried. “And you’ll have three weeks to work on it there.” 

“New deadline,” said Ellison, interrupting something that Rodney could have argued to death with John, but wouldn’t dare with the look on Ellison’s face. “Meeting with the Director in half an hour. All of us.”

John frowned at that. “The _Director_? General O’Neill was dealing with her.”

Blair nodded. “And then we screwed things up by taking you on an unauthorized field trip, so she wants everybody back on the regular program. I told her there’s injuries involved, so she’s handling it. Personally.”

“Well, did we screw up what she worked out with O’Neill?” asked John.

“No, this is just... getting us back on the leash, for lack of a better way to put it. If we’d been doing our jobs right from the start, you wouldn’t have been hurt, and she’s... well, redesigning the course schedule.”

“Great,” said Rodney, stepping back from the artifacts on the table. There went his plans for getting anything done while John sorted out his senses. John set a hand to his back and stepped closer. 

“You can work on it on the Daedalus. It’ll work out,” he said, voice low but right at his ear. Rodney nodded. He could live with it, but he didn’t have to like it.

  
  
*~*~*  
  
  


The new team, minus Teyla and Ronon (because Sheppard wanted them _nowhere_ near the Project’s management) met with the Director in one of the classrooms. John was glad he didn't have to sit in the Admin conference room again at least, but he still didn't like the setup. He stuck close to Rodney, and that was his whole plan, really. Keep Rodney from mouthing off, watch his own attitude, and don't screw up the work the General had done for them any further than they had already. They were home free in just a few days. They just had to stay out of trouble that long.

Granted, that wasn’t Sheppard's strong suit, but he could try it out.

The Director of the Sentinel Project was not what Sheppard expected. He expected a San Francisco CEO in a skirt and heels with manicured claws. He got a honey-blonde former test pilot who showed up in jeans and boots and a cashmere sweater. Joanna McMasters introduced herself with the full bio like any new professor would start, complete with apologies to Blair for having to listen to it, and she had logged a lot of flight hours before switching gears into the Sentinel Project and eventually taking over when General Glass died. She seemed legit.

John had spent a whole month hating on someone he would have hooked up with in another life and it took almost a full minute for his brain to get right with that. 

Sitting leaned back in his chair, his shoulder snug up against Rodney’s, John was very aware of Rodney’s opinion of his Kirk-like tendencies and realized maybe the man wasn't as wrong about that as he wanted to believe. Trying to sneak under the radar, John caught Rodney’s hand at his thigh and laced his fingers between to loosely hang on. Proof he wasn't Kirking it even when he knew well enough Rodney wouldn't appreciate the "polite" smile stuck on his face if he'd seen it. 

He sobered up quick enough when the woman started reciting the mission statement and stood in front of them, with a straight face, and assured them that the Sentinel Project’s strict bylaws and the legislation they mirrored were for the protection of the Sentinel, and by extension, their Guides. Director McMasters wanted to be sure everyone understood their roles within the Project, and spent nearly a half an hour repeating the same tripe Sheppard had first read in the trash-manual. John pulled his sunglasses from his pocket and hid behind them, and found a stick of gum to chew on in an effort to avoid grinding his jaw.

By then, Rodney had cottoned on to Sheppard's mood change in a big way and didn't seem to like it. He had claimed John's hand in both of his and kept it trapped in his lap under the table. It helped Sheppard keep the scowl off his face and the lying, blank-minded smile on it. 

Stiles and Derek had taken seats behind the first row, (because _teenagers,_ ) and angled just behind John. Sheppard could hear the panic attack the kid was staving off by the same trick of latching onto his Guide. Derek had his arm over the back of Stiles' chair, too. In contrast, not far away in John's row, Blair slouched in his chair with his arms crossed, and Ellison was the only one in the room who looked bored.

John finally had to interrupt and ask for a break, blaming his shoulder. "Just need fifteen to take care of it," he said, with all the charm he could muster. McMasters looked to Blair for confirmation. Sandburg blinked and sat up, taking a minute to catch up with how he had been dragged into things.

"Uh, yeah. He was going toxic on Rodney. Dr. Beckett had to up his meds and he's got a salve for it, for pain management," Blair reported. Like it was the Director's business to check up in the first place. It got them a fifteen minute recess, and John was out of the chair like he planned to use every second of it.

"Breakroom," Sheppard informed his team.

"I'll get some tea started, too," said Blair, smoothly laying down a cover story. "That should help between applications of the salve."

John nodded as he held the door to make sure everyone was out. Then he gave his most charming smile to the Director and followed them. Once they were all in the larger, open space of the breakroom, with the windows, and the food smells, John claimed a table and Derek and Stiles dropped down in the seats across from him. Rodney for some reason chose to stand behind him and leaned on his chair. 

"Listen, all that BS... is not how we do things. It's how they do things here, but it's not how it works at home. Got me? You can tune her out the rest of the day, far as I care, just don't piss her off and we'll be fine," Sheppard said, voice low as he outlined clear rebellion in public.

"She said it's how they do things in the military, that's why it's how they do things here," said Stiles. " _You’re_ military."

" _Atlantis_ isn't," replied John. "Weir isn't going to start questioning my calls because of this." He distractedly waved his right hand to show the healing tattoo. "My teams won't. They don't know this shit. As long as I'm stable, nothing will change."

Blair showed up then, a steaming paper mug of brewing tea water put on the table under Sheppard’s nose. Another was slid across to Stiles. John glanced up at him. "My shoulder's fine."

"Yeah, well, it’s tea," replied Blair with a shrug. "Better get the salve on."

Sheppard grumbled at the details and fished around in his pocket for the tin of lotion Carson had given him. 

"What’s her story, anyway?" Rodney asked. Hearing his voice made John realize the man had been silent for over forty minutes. That had to be some kind of record. "Beyond the _pilot_ BS. That was only there to shut John up."

Sheppard dropped his eyes to the tabletop as he fiddled with the lid of the container in his hands. It wasn’t like Rodney was wrong about _that_.

"Her husband was a Sentinel. That's what got her in on the Project at first," said Blair.

"Then why was she talking at me and Derek the whole time?" Rodney asked. "She didn't even acknowledge Ellison, and when John said something, she looked to you."

" _She_ wasn't the _Guide_ ," said Ellison. There was a dark sort of grin on his face. It shouldn't have been funny, because there was nothing more dangerous than a woman in power bent on revenge, but with the advantage of hindsight, knowing the way the program had been shaped because of it, it seemed appropriate. 

"Great," Rodney muttered. 

"She's sharp. She's got more business sense than Glass did. And she’s got a short fuse for Sentinel. Her focus is on creating a useful tool for the military. And she’s going to press Derek on that a lot, I think," said Blair. Stiles snorted into his tea, which was still too hot for him to drink so he just breathed on it.

"That's nice," Derek said with a shrug. "Good luck with that."

"Oh," John said, suddenly reminded of something. "O’Neill said they're still going to insist on the tattoo, Stiles. Military or not."

Stiles' eyes went wide. "I don't do so great with needles..."

"I can talk you guys through it," said Blair. "We just have to get you focused on something else. So you won't see it."

Rodney huffed. "It put John under for _six hours_. Are you kidding?"

"I didn't _faint_ , McKay," returned Sheppard, digging back. Rodney leaned lower to hang over his shoulder and be annoyingly in his space.

"Yeah? Prove it," said Rodney, a smug grin on his face. John put a hand to his face to push him lightly away and Rodney let go of the back of the chair to wrap his arms over John's shoulders to settle in just where he was, hugging his collar. John caught his arm and held on while he was there. Then Rodney grabbed the smelly tin off the table in front of John and stood up with it. One less thing for John to worry about, so he let it disappear. 

"There was so much wrong about how you were brought on, I'm _not even_ going there," said Blair. "Just trust me, there's a way to do it."

"Funny, the thought that two organizations based on secrecy might not communicate very efficiently from separate galaxies. Huh," said Rodney. He shocked the hell out of John by ordering him to move his shirt sleeve out of the way and John reluctantly let him help. It was _weird_ though. Rodney didn't even like dealing with papercuts, and the bite was a lot uglier. But John watched him to make sure he was okay at it, and then scowled when he wiped the reminder off his hands onto John's face.

"Oh my god. Go away," John complained as he turned to escape the mess. He reached for the tea, hoping to avoid another sneezing fit by distraction with the hot flavor of whatever he was being told to drink today. ( _Still a poor substitute for beer._ )

They ran out the clock as long as Ellison would let them and Blair refilled John's tea to take back with them. Stiles had hardly made a dent in his yet.

"I want breaks," Sheppard told Blair on their walk back through the halls. "If this is what we're in for today, I don't care what we've gotta say, I want breaks."

"Yessir, I figured," replied Blair. That actually made Sheppard feel better about the likelihood of his making it through the day sane. McMasters met them at the classroom after they had all taken their seats and she seemed happy enough that they were punctual.

She still spent the next hour _politely_ reminding the Sentinel in the room that they were a menace to society and a danger to themselves and therefore it was in their very best interests that they couldn't be trusted on their own. It was the Guide's job to keep them safe and out of trouble and preferably off of life support, so they should have a mutually agreed upon plan in place for that among themselves. She clearly had no idea she sat in the same room as a _werewolf_ and John was as relieved by that as he was amused.

And part of that whole _Guide thing_ was to report back to the Project about how their team was doing out in the field. The injury list, the zone triggers, the solutions; the Project kept track of all of them. Filed it all away for the _Guide's_ reference. It was, according to McMasters, a resource for keeping everyone on track and safe, so changes in the senses could be noticed before they presented problems, and other bullshit. It sounded to Sheppard like a storehouse of info on how to take out the Sentinel in targeted ops. But he sat there and listened, slouched in his chair, with his fingers looped in Rodney's pocket under the edge of the table as McMasters walked the two new Guides through the information they were expected to provide in after-action reports. And just for practice, they could start with the field-trip that had taken them off campus for twenty-four hours two days earlier.

 _Hell no_ they wouldn't. 

"That activity was classified," Sheppard said, speaking up without waiting to be noticed. "They absolutely _cannot_ start with that."

McMasters collected a few stapled pieces of paper from her stack of notes and walked it over to McKay. She held it out to him. "This is Captain Sandburg’s report of the event. Does it contain any sensitive account of the action?"

Rodney took the report and speed-read his way through it. Then, rather than hand it back to the woman, he passed it to John. He didn't look happy, but at least he didn't see anything that pissed him off. John started reading quickly.

"Anything objectionable, Colonel McKay?" McMasters asked. John glanced over at Rodney at the foreign-sounding title just rolling out of the woman's mouth. It sounded wrong. John almost corrected her to _Dr_. instead, but it would only be inviting an argument he already knew he wouldn't win. There was a determined look on Rodney’s face, so John figured he needed to let him handle it himself.

"No, ma'am," Rodney said. "Captain Ellison’s actions were not classified. It probably violates HIPA in a few places, but-"

"Captain Sandburg isn't a doctor. His observations are not a medical diagnosis, therefore no medical privacy violations are possible. It is an integral part of the program, and I assure you, Colonel Sheppard signed an authorization for such information to be collated."

And, as John saw it, everything in the report was skillfully written and laser-focused on Jim. It mentioned the reaction to the dark, to the smells, to the team around him. Kincaid even got a mention, because Blair included some conjecture that there was an emotional toll on the criminal's unexpected involvement, and included the note that Kincaid knew about the Sentinel Project. The werewolves were not mentioned. Nor was the exact cause of the eight-hour coma Jim had been left in after extraction, nor the location of the medical bay they had sought care in. It was, technically, as unclassified as a report could get and still include factual information of the events. John handed it back to Rodney, rather than bother with McMasters.

"Understood," Sheppard reported. Rodney echoed him, trying to get McMasters to leave him alone, probably. The Director took the paper from them and passed it over to Derek.

"Do you think you could sit down and write something like that regarding the events in Beacon Hills?" McMasters asked Rodney and Derek both. "Today, this afternoon."

"That was two days ago," said Rodney, his usual low-level annoyance in his tone. "And I already wrote a report for General O'Neill."

"Good, then you should be able to write one for Sheppard's file," said McMasters with a smile. "I'm sure you noticed the differences." 

"Of course I did," grumbled McKay, looking insulted.

"Great!" And McMasters turned her attention back to Derek then. The young man glanced at Sheppard over the top of the page he was reading and John happened to catch it on the peripheral. He offered a shrug and a vague nod before facing front again. 

"Yeah, I can write," Derek said to the Director, and Sheppard had to work hard at curbing a smile. McMasters said a few more friendly-sounding, encouraging words as she walked back to the table at the front and picked up two tablets. They didn't look like much, thin things without a protective case. They were not built for off-world travel and would break the first time somebody dropped their pack. John could see the smoke coming out of Rodney’s offended brain already as he was handed a child's play-thing masquerading as a computer.

"This afternoon, we'll get you set up in the system. I've been warned your posting will have you out of communication range for most of the year. The SPR files can be zipped and sent in email as needed," McMasters told them. "But at least in the meantime you'll have the form."

And the woman then ever so kindly walked the _genius_ and the _teenager_ through how to use a computer tablet and how to set up user accounts in different applications and finally - _finally_ \- on how to write the SPR's. If the woman hadn't been sitting on the table five feet in front of him, John would have slumped over and beat his head on the desk like Stiles did as he tried to stay awake through the boredom of waiting for their Guides to type-on-demand. _Just in case_ McMasters or Sandburg needed to be there to help them get it right.

John keeled sideways in his chair to lean in Rodney's space and hid his snooping behind sunglasses. He couldn't exactly steal the man's hand as he hunted-and-pecked on the on-screen keyboard, so John just tucked his hand in Rodney's pocket. He wanted to be close, or he wanted to be not in the room, and he really, _really_ wanted to be out on a run, pain notwithstanding, so barring those options, John would sneak what closeness he could. If it annoyed Rodney, it wasn’t like the man wouldn't let him know, loud and clear. In the meantime, maybe it would piss off McMasters.

*~*~*


	41. Chapter 41

Stiles didn't get out of the tattoo. The Director dumped the ultimatum on him just before she let General O’Neill in the classroom with a stack of paperwork for everyone. Sheppard had already signed it, so he gave Stiles and Derek the go-ahead. Rodney was annoyed because he had to sign everything after they did, and then he had to sign for Blair and Ellison, too.

Everything was officially official. General O’Neill even shook his hand and welcomed Stiles to Homeworld Security.

And nobody once mentioned his real name, even though it was printed right there on the page. It was a good bet nobody except Daniel Jackson could pronounce it, but the fact that none of the adults felt like they needed to try it was actually kind of welcoming all on its own.

They didn't have to worry about uniforms like Rodney had, and Sheppard promised them that matter would be sorted out on Atlantis. And then he and Rodney argued over whether they would be on Security detail or the Science crew. Stiles stood back and watched the ping-pong match because it was the second most interesting thing he had seen all afternoon.

"Security," said Sheppard. "One, because I need them there, and two because I said so."

"I could say the same damn thing and you know it," challenged Rodney. He crossed his arms to sell it, even. "Derek's already got Latin and French, so I was going to get him started on learning Ancient while Daniel's here to help. We've got _weeks_ to kill on the Daedalus and-"

Sheppard looked to Derek then, Rodney on ignore for the moment.

"You know Latin?" he asked, surprised.

"And Spanish," offered Derek with a nod. Even General O'Neill looked impressed.

"Knew I was forgetting one," muttered Rodney.

"Huh," said O’Neill.

"Good man," said Sheppard. He smiled smugly over at O'Neill then. "Records belie the brains, eh, General?"

"Yeah, yeah. I _got_ you your team, settle down," O’Neill replied.

Even Rodney dropped the argument then, but there was a Significant Glare™ between him and Sheppard that promised there would be more discussion on the issue. And in the meantime, Director McMasters showed back up to ruin the buzz Stiles had going.

"All done with them, General?" she asked.

"For now," said O’Neill. "I somehow doubt that will last long, so let's just go with that while we can."

"Understood, sir," said McMasters. She smiled like a normal human but Stiles wound up wishing for mountain ash to block her in her office or something. He was pretty sure it would work on her.

"Captain Sandburg, can you please see Stiles to the infirmary?" she asked.

And just like that, everyone's good mood was gone. Even General O’Neill’s smile faded as he looked over at Colonel Carter for an explanation. Sheppard went a little red but he set his jaw and tried to stand up a little taller against the obvious anger.

"You're with him," Sheppard said, tapping Derek's arm to shove him lightly toward Stiles. He was already looking over at Blair, expecting him to hold good on his word. Stiles wanted to be sick.

McMasters started to follow them out of the room, but she stopped to get Rodney's attention. "You two, stay in here, please. Finish the report. I'll be back shortly."

It wasn’t like they would have been able to help much if they had gone, but now it hit differently. Maybe Stiles could have used the moral support, damnit. It felt more like a punishment being dished out on Sheppard and McKay. Stiles saw Derek pick up the computer tablet he had been given as he steered Stiles away from their table and toward the door. If Sheppard had zoned for six hours, maybe Derek was expecting to have time to kill.

Carson was waiting in the infirmary, one more familiar face, at least. Stiles wanted to ask for Teyla, for some reason, but he felt stupid. He was an (almost) adult who argued with werewolves and fought with hunters. He could handle a tattoo. It was just a bunch of needles. And blood. And the tattoo looked cool on literally half the people on campus that Stiles had seen the last few days.

"I don't want red," Stiles told Carson, quickly reminded of the thing he didn't like about all of the tattoos. "Alphas are red. Don't want it."

"Aye, no red. No warm colors, really, nothing hostile," said Carson. "That pretty much leaves ye with white, green, or blue like the Colonel's."

"Blue. Blue works," said Stiles. He looked to Derek and saw him smile. Derek had gone blue-eyed over the summer as his pack dropped off to go to Scott. He could have followed them, Scott wanted him to, but Derek stuck it out on his own, with Stiles raiding his kitchen on the weekends, oblivious. Blue was Stiles favorite color lately.

"Atlantis colors," said Carson, apparently happy with the choice. He passed along the request to the tattoo artist as he pointed Stiles to have a lie-down on one of the beds. Stiles hoped the bed was overkill, but he didn't complain at it. Derek sat down on the edge of the bed and Stiles' left hand unerringly found the shirt at his low back to hang onto.

Tattoos looked cool but tattoos were not his thing, hadn’t ever really been. It was on the list of things Stiles had made a deal with his dad he wouldn't mess with until after high school; no tattoos, no getting anybody pregnant, and no getting married. He was supposed to be a kid still. Well, two out of three failures as a Good Son were nothing compared to the whole _werewolf_ fiasco his dad had been locked in. Sometimes _life_ screwed everything up.

Blair showed up then and stood at the end of the bed, looking frazzled and muttering an apology for getting held up in the hall. Stiles nodded absently, then started to ask where Jim had gone, but got distracted by the guy who would apparently be doing the tatoo taking a seat nearby. The guy with the tattoo gun didn't introduce himself or anything, just looked up as the Director walked up to stand beside him, and she smiled at Stiles like he wasn't _actually_ scared of being stabbed by needles.

"I really don't like needles," Stiles tried again. "Blood isn't my favorite, either."

"You'll be fine," said the Director, pleasant enough. It was weird though, after a few hours of her not speaking to him while acting like a teacher, to have her look at him and _say_ something now. Stiles blinked at her. Then the tattoo guy caught his attention.

"You ready?" he asked. Stiles shook his head in a very clear negative.

"Yeah," he said anyway, because he had to sit through the stupid thing eventually otherwise he couldn't get to Atlantis. The tattoo guy grinned at him for it and caught his right hand to get it arranged where he could reach it comfortably and work. Stiles started to feel nauseous and lightheaded and dragged at Derek’s shirt because he kept spiking his vision up too high, zooming in and hyper-focused on the needle gun.

"Stiles, if you're not good with this stuff, find something else in the room to look at," said Blair. He sounded calmer now and Stiles heard him working on the deep breathing, relaxing steps he had told them about. "Watch Derek. Count the hair on his head, or something."

Stiles' eyes darted to Derek then and Derek reached enough to catch his hand away from his shirt so he could give him a face to look at instead of his back. He was still in defensive mode, but he was changing his list of potential targets to defend against down to just defending Stiles from Stiles, apparently.

"Hey, man, are you listening over there?" Blair asked. "When I say _watch_ , I mean really focus. Find something to stare at and hold on it. Turn down everything else. Don't balance it out, just _shut down_ everything except sight, and focus."

Stiles hesitated and looked away from Derek then. The tattoo guy was laying a stencil on his hand and that seemed harmless enough. But it was Blair's instructions that didn't make sense.

"You said not to do that yesterday," said Stiles, confused. "It will cause a zone."

"It _will_. That's the point," said Blair. "This is a safe, controlled environment. Derek is right here. So turn everything down except your vision, focus on one thing to look at, _and_ on breathing, and you can protect yourself from the stuff you're worried about. _You_ control the zone, as long as you keep breathing. It's just hyperfocus."

"How do I know to come out of it? And if I turn everything down, Jim said that will make Derek sick," said Stiles. Blair shook his head at him.

"No, only when you're in physical distress and trying to shut it down. That's when he'll pick up on it. But you're fine, and you're safe, and he's right here," said Blair patiently. "When it's done, he'll hold his hand over your eyes to get your attention back. You just gotta find the focus spot."

Stiles looked over at the progress on the tattoo and saw a blue ink outline already on his skin from a marker. He could feel every touch and tug and weird manipulation of his hand that resulted from the man's work. It wasn't so bad so far. He could do it.

While he was looking at his hand, though, the artist traded the marker for the tattoo gun and Stiles accidentally hyperfocused on the gun again. He didn't even have anything else turned down yet. And he saw the first line of black go into his skin.

Stiles passed out.

*~*~*

“So I’m going to have to write two reports every time we go out now?” Rodney asked, his attention on the tablet as he tried to distract himself from the scowl on John’s face. The man sat on the table at the front of the room, slouched from the pain in his ribs and worrying his fingers over the healing tattoo on his right hand.

“No, you write the one for _her_ ,” said Sheppard. “I’ll write the ones for the SGC. You just have to sign those when they’re done.”

“We’re stuck in redundancy hell,” muttered Rodney.

“So we split the load,” replied John. It was a sensible approach, but Rodney didn’t think John really bought into his own theory, based on the anger in his voice. Rodney was definitely getting better at picking up on things from John that he would have missed before, expressions associated with emotions and intent, the kind of social cues Rodney had once been happily ignorant of. He wasn’t sure if it was supposed to work like that or not yet though and he didn’t want to ask. It was something he wanted to make sense of on his own.

“I’m still not going to get anything done,” Rodney complained. “Maybe we can rig an away message to the ‘gate, telling anyone who dials in that the scientist is busy and there’s no appointments available for hostile takeovers.”

“I need to check in with Elizabeth,” said John suddenly. “Make sure they’re still good.”

“No you don’t,” came Jim Ellison’s voice from the door as it opened. “Leave that can of worms alone. We’re only a few days out if we don’t screw anything up.”

John sat up, careful and moving slow, as Jim walked in. “Are we allowed to leave yet?”

“Is the report done,” replied Jim. Rodney glared at the tiny screen and tried to put words in some semblance of the right order. The Sentinel left the door and moved up to stand not far from John at the front of the room, arms crossed and his usual unreadable mask in place.

“This isn’t easy, you know. And people keep talking,” Rodney said in his own defense. Jim just waved toward him in illustration.

“That would be a _no_ ,” he said.

“Fine. How’s the kid?” John asked. He was still talking but Rodney didn’t point that out because he wanted to know the answer too.

“Dunno. They wouldn’t let me in,” said Jim. “From what I heard at the door, though, he passed out. Kid really doesn’t like needles.”

John scrubbed at his face with both hands, the sunglasses shoved up on his head. “Carson’s got him?”

“Yep. And Blair. And Hale can keep his head. They’ll figure it out,” said Jim.

“Why couldn’t you get in?” Rodney asked. Jim shrugged it off, annoyed but not worried about it.

“They’ve still got the two injured in there. Sentinel _and_ Guide teams. It can get a little dicey having too many teams in one place when they’re injured. Too many overprotective assholes in one place is a bad idea when instinct’s the only thing at the helm.”

Rodney looked to John to find the man looking uncomfortably surprised by the news.

“Come again? We have _three_ on this team. There’s gonna be problems?” John asked. “I’m hearing this _now_?”

“I’m not their team,” Jim said. “I’m an instructor. I’m a Sentinel. And there’s two soldiers down who have their Guides right there. They can’t defend them and it was decided that my presence would be too disruptive for them.”

“Oh come on-”

“Stiles went after Beckett when the kid was only half conscious,” Jim pointed out. “These kids, one can’t hear and one can’t see. They’re going to be strung out. And protective. Stiles might not even want us around until he gets back to himself. And since we don’t know, Lindsay’s team didn’t want to risk it. It’s no big deal. Pretty normal.”

“You’re saying you’re some kind of threat, with this stuff?” John asked, trying to clarify. He waved a hand toward Rodney. “To me? Or to Rodney?”

“No, I’m saying that, were you down a sense and medicated, you might view me as one. Especially if I got too close to what you see as yours,” replied Jim. “You would get agitated and you would not rest. In the med bay, that’s not ideal, right?”

That made for some semblance of logic but John obviously still wasn’t a fan of it. But he left it alone with little more than a nod.

“Alright. So. Since this is news, here’s the other heads up,” said Jim. “It goes both ways. The Guides can get just as punchy. But they’re usually - I said _usually_ \- more accepting of other Sentinel. Blair and Rodney latched on to Stiles from the start. Just a kid in the woods.”

“Let the record show, McKay hates kids,” said John. Rodney rolled his eyes but didn’t look up because John was watching him, thinking over the evidence being offered. “There’s this one planet full of ‘em... Rodney always sends Zelenka when their tech breaks.”

“That’s different,” Rodney said, speaking to the tablet screen and the report he was doing a poor job of updating.

“Stiles is on your team. And he’s responding to that,” said Jim, looking to John. “He asked Blair about this thing he caught himself doing when you left Rodney in the gym the other day. The kid kept putting himself between Rodney and the fights. He picked up that you and McKay weren’t doing great, and he went into defense mode, but he didn’t know why, and he was confused why he was trying to protect Rodney from Derek and Daniel.”

Rodney slunk lower in his chair. John raised an eyebrow.

"And that's normal?" he asked. John straightened up like he hurt suddenly and Rodney frowned over at him.

Jim shrugged. "Statistical probability says yes."

"Human psychology says otherwise," came the Director's voice. Startled, Rodney turned to see the woman standing in the open doorway, and then promptly glared at Ellison for not having closed the door.

"It's not healthy. The level of tribalism in a unit like a Sentinel unit. It can get dangerous," said McMasters as she walked to the front. John blinked at her.

"I- I'm sorry, were you just speaking to me? Or should I remind you that McKay’s over there, behind you there," John said. Rodney had opinions about the traitor pointing the woman in his direction but he was busy trying to write words into entire sentences about things he had historically been bad at paying attention to in other humans.

"Excellent point," replied McMasters easily. She turned away from John and moved to stand next to Rodney. She put a hand to the back of Rodney’s chair and crouched beside him, balanced neatly between the chair and a hand on the edge of the table. She smiled up at him. "So. How can I help? You seem to be struggling with this. Let's figure it out."

Rodney blinked at her, very confused. Evil dictator witches didn’t offer help without some form of payment required.

"I assure you, I can write," he began, but she was already nodding.

"I've seen your file. A man doesn't get that many abbreviations after his name without the _ability_ to write," McMasters replied. "But this isn't a scientific paper. And I think you may be overthinking the requirements. The example I gave you was written by a man with twenty-five years experience in anthropological studies and about half that was spent on this subject. It would be crazy to expect you and Mr. Hale to know exactly what to include or not include in these assessments without some generalized guidance."

"Wait- you're _actually_ offering to help?" Rodney asked, looking down at the woman and silently reassessing her existence. This was not his arena, and John was not a reliable interlocutor for the situation with the woman's blatant bias at play. The Director rolled her eyes but was still sort of smiling

"Yes, Colonel. That is literally why I am here this afternoon," she said. "We can walk through this out loud if you need to. It may actually help you process what's important and not. Remember, these are for your benefit, later. A form of reference notes."

" _Doctor_ ," corrected John from where he sat on the table at the front of the room. He was not a happy man and Ellison shifted slightly to break his eye line on them. McMasters leaned her elbow on the table beside Rodney, still crouched and apparently comfortable enough where she was.

"The team's military title is preferred on campus because of the obvious emphasis of the program, as it is what you will be called by out in the field, but you are certainly allowed to request the use of your personal title over the team's title," she told him.

Rodney felt very stuck suddenly. A _team title_ was at least acknowledging John. Which seemed difficult to get people in the Project to do otherwise. But it bothered the both of them and that was the only reason John had brought it up anyway.

"Doctor McKay is fine," he decided, hoping that was the right call.

"Very well. What's left of the report that you haven't gotten typed up yet, Dr. McKay?" McMasters asked, seemingly unfazed by the request. That was twice John had challenged her and twice she had sidestepped to call his bluff. Rodney didn't want to find out what would happen if the third time's the proverbial charm.

"I was actually just thinking I should work it through with John," he said. "As it's reference notes rather than a report."

John was off the front table and stepping around Ellison in some kind of record time considering how slowly he had been moving that afternoon.

" _Great_ idea," said John, the fake smile that didn't even try for charming on his face. He stood in Rodney's space, staring down at McMasters. She just stayed where she was, her chin on her hand over the table as she waved with the other.

"Pull up a chair, Colonel," she invited. "Teamwork is encouraged."

Rodney had never been so stressed in his life as he was when sitting exactly in between John and the Director. For another half an hour he managed to keep John from doing anything stupid, long enough to scrape together complete "notes" that didn't require clearing through Sam and O’Neill.

Rodney just wanted to be done. He had a bizarre headache squeezing his temples in a vice and wanted to get some type of food to try curtailing whatever physical crash was hitting him even though he should have been able to make it another hour to dinner.

McMasters read over it and finally didn't have any feedback of her own to offer and accepted it as complete. She handed the tablet back to him with a smile and a nod.

"You'll get the hang of it. Shorthand starts to develop to make it quicker, too," she said. She crossed her arms and took a deep breath.

"So. How’s your head?" she asked Rodney directly. It was entirely out of left field and Rodney wasn't sure what to do with it.

"Headache, yes," he replied, not sure what the correct answer was supposed to have been. McMasters patted his shoulder sympathetically.

"Sorry," she told him. She stepped back and moved around the table to start cleaning up the materials she had left at the front table. "Colonel Sheppard, you've proven my point spectacularly and can calm down any time. I'm over here now."

Rodney sunk back in his chair, an annoyed sigh curbed as he crossed his arms over his chest. _What the hell was that supposed to mean?_ He pinched at the bridge of his nose and waited because he was sure the simply diabolical female would monologue about it without invitation.

To his surprise, however, there was no further explanation. And John sat up from the lean over his knees that had kept him in Rodney's space for the last half an hour. Rodney glanced over at him to see John watching him, wide-eyed and jaw slack.

"What?" Rodney asked, impatient for the punchline.

"Sorry," John muttered at him. He leaned carefully forward again to press a kiss to his temple and then stood and moved away.

"What-"

"Dials slipped. I... wasn't paying attention," John said. He ended up lurking behind Ellison, which was much closer to McMasters than Rodney figured he would want to get. The woman folded her arms and leaned back on the table, ankles crossed.

"As I said, territorial tribalism within a Sentinel unit is harmful," said McMasters. "And the Guides are the ones smack in the middle of it. So Dr. McKay, you're going to need to get with Captain Sandburg on how to protect yourself. You're most at risk, with three Sentinel on one team, only one of whom has the experience required to _prevent_ harm."

The dawning realization of where the headache had come from, the ratcheted tension something earned from John's apparent anger at the Director as she sat next to him at the desk and worked through the report rather well with the both of them, did nothing to make Rodney feel better.

"So what, you're saying they all broadcast the signal and I'm the one stuck picking it up?" he asked, resigned to surprise annoyances biting him in the ass on the regular now.

"You, and Derek, and Blair," said Ellison. "It's pheromones, hormones, whatever. You tune into it. Maybe the kid won't make you sick like this when he gets to stressing about protecting team territory, but you'll notice if you're paying attention."

"Oh."

McMasters nodded at him before looking back at John.

"Get present and start paying attention, Colonel Sheppard, " said the Director. "Homeworld asked for my best team on this, and I gave it to them, and after four days of reports, I'm certainly doubting the wisdom of it. If you learn nothing else this week, learn that there are times to push and times to rest. Work on assessing where the _danger_ actually is, because it could be you. When your Guide is worried because you're hurt, listen to _that_. When your Guide is hurt, needs the hospital, boosting that adrenaline on him through that connection, that can save his life. When he's trying to work? It hurts him if he can't use up what you're channeling to him." She waved toward Rodney to make sure John was paying attention, but she kept her voice even and calm as she looked back over her shoulder at the upset Sentinel.

"No, we don't know _how_ it works yet, we just know it does. The studies are on my side on this. Sentinel are _easily_ provoked and entirely predictable and in the few days you have been here, you have displayed clearly that _you_ are not immune to this. But you're the team lead, and you're far from stable, so you'll take the whole unit down unless you learn."

Rodney stared at John as the Director talked. He decided he didn't want her to address his Sentinel anymore, as it happened. Maybe every word she said was true, but it wasn’t something John could do anything about. The man needed four days of sleep, easily, and to heal. There wasn't much to be done about that. But McMasters was right; that was still up to John.

"We can learn. We just have to have time," Rodney told the Director. "And where we work, we don't have that luxury. It's not what we're used to. It's not academic for us. Just life. We have days, not months."

"So I would suggest you tune in for the days you have, and follow the program. No more classified field trips. No more favors," replied McMasters. She shrugged her shoulders. "You’re here three more days. Please, gentlemen, change my mind. Turn this team around. Because it's not looking great so far."

Behind Ellison, John stood up, straightened his shoulders to stand at attention, hands loose behind his back. His sunglasses were tucked back on his collar.

"Yes, ma'am."

The anger was gone from his voice. The Lt. Colonel was still a soldier under orders, somewhere, Rodney guessed. It wasn’t a look Rodney saw in John much for the last year, though.

McMasters nodded her acceptance of the report and looked to Rodney. "Dr. McKay, your team is dismissed. Dr. Beckett expects to be dealing with Stilinski and Hale for the next few hours. They'll be released to the dorm when they're done. I suggest you gentlemen use your downtime wisely."

Rodney scrambled to stand and collected his tablet.

*~*~*

McMasters had drawn some battle lines for him and Sheppard decided he needed to get more present, so he called in the only unaccounted for pair of his team and kept everybody close after the afternoon's class. Teyla and Ronon had gotten proficient at entertaining themselves on campus but that hadn’t been the plan at the start. John was feeling the failures of the day and he didn't like feeling he had abandoned them to boredom.

They all figured out how to get dinner going on their own and set aside food for their missing crew still stuck in the infirmary. Sam and Daniel had gone back to the SGC with O’Neill hours ago so that made things a little simpler for Sheppard to keep track of.

John sat at the table in the dorm’s kitchen, hunkered over the book he had known about for a week and had yet to try reading. The Director was right, and he had some catching up to do. _Rodney_ hadn’t even finished the thing. It was over four hundred pages long and they’d been busy, damnit. But John was tired of surprises and he took a highlighter to his copy.

Ronon and Teyla sat across from each other, learning how to play rummy and baccarat from Ellison with a beat-up old deck of cards and a box of sugar cubes for wagering with. Rodney sat at the other end of the table from Ellison, his laptop out and his brain whirring away at the issue of the Daedalus and the ProX. John propped himself up between Teyla and Rodney, hating the chairs that were completely unforgiving of bruised ribs and shoulders.

He caught himself trying to sync up his breathing with Rodney a few times and tried to pull his senses back, tried to stay focused on learning what exactly he was doing when he did that, rather than just let himself do it. He brushed his shoulder or arm against Teyla from time to time and kept his ankles tangled with Rodney’s to stay present. No zone outs, no taking naps; John figured he did alright on the downtime. Rodney set an alarm on his laptop and every hour, on the hour, flicked the tin of salve at John for his shoulder. John was pretty sure that wasn’t what Carson had intended with the stuff, but absent Carson to ask, he went along with Rodney’s orders.

They got Stiles and Derek and Blair back around ten pm. Another six hour project for a tattoo. Carson said it was broken up in pieces to keep the kid from a proper zone, but Blair helped Derek coach him through it. At least one team in the unit was hitting the right benchmarks. They were exhausted for it, though. Stiles looked half asleep on his feet but proud of himself so John backed himself off the mental swearing fit he had every time he saw the kid’s hand wrapped.

Derek dropped down into the chair opposite John with his plate of microwaved food, noting the book and highlighter in front of him.

"It's helpful," he said, nodding at the book. "But most of the stuff we've run into still doesn't get much mention."

"I figure, if I know how the engine runs, I can turn it on and drive it," said John with a shrug.

"You can fly planes, but you cannot build them," countered Rodney. "That book will not tell you how to turn anything off."

John rolled his eyes at him. "I don't want to turn it off, I told you that. I'm talking about a _Parts and Features_ manual then, that better?"

Rodney nodded. John sighed and opted to ignore Rodney, studying Derek instead. "So how'd you hold up?"

Derek shrugged. "Alright," he said. He didn't seem inclined to discuss it so John didn't press. He switched gears pretty quick. "Lydia texted me while I was down at the infirmary at some point tonight. She said the Alphas disappeared. Just up and gone. She said Scott thinks he's in the clear."

"From what I'm told, what Scott thinks and what's actually true don't always line up," said Sheppard. "So is he maybe right about this?"

With a solid air of confidence in the call, Derek nodded. "He would know if the Alphas left. It's like, something pops in your brain and the static drops off. He would feel it once he was out of their territory again."

"Well. That's good to hear," said John, nodding as he thought on it. They had taken down two of the Alphas, at least, and who knew what kind of damage Ronon and Teyla had done before Sheppard had gotten down to them. He could believe it if Derek could. "Must be a relief off you guys."

Stiles scraped at his plate and shrugged. "Scott can get stuffed. But I'm okay with everyone else not being dead any time soon, yeah."

"That's fair," replied John.

When he finished with his late dinner, Stiles wanted in on the card games so Ellison branched out to poker. It was late and they needed to be turning in, but John closed his book and asked to be dealt in instead. Carson held his hands up and backed away from the table.

“Not my game,” he said.

“Aww, it’s just sugar cubes, doc,” John replied, teasing.

“An’ sugar’s not healthy in such amounts,” Carson told him. He instead stood and cleared away the plates of the other late diners. Even Blair seemed to hesitate until Ellison made the call for him and put a card down in front of him. John stared at Rodney to try to drag him into it, even put a hand on the laptop to threaten to close it, but Rodney cut him a glare at the warning so he _didn’t_ drag him into it.

Poker was definitely an interesting experience when one could cheat by listening to heartbeats, watching other players' eyes, or even just by sniffing the air. Ronon was, surprisingly, the first one to fold, challenged boldly by Stiles. Then Derek, again sniffed out by Stiles. He wavered but hung on, and then folded when Teyla bumped the betting up again. She wasn't new to poker, but she didn't often join in with the military brats around the cafeteria back home. She usually made it to the last round, though, when John played with her. Ronon folding so early had been a surprise.

John couldn't get a read on Blair. The guy was probably used to people cheating at poker after fifteen odd years as Ellison’s partner. Not that Ellison cheated. But it was never put into the house rules that Sentinel weren't allowed to snoop, John noticed. The next round, Blair raised and Teyla went down. Ronon reached over and stole one of the sugar cubes from her reserves and popped it in his mouth, despite still having a stack of his own.

Stiles was a kid, crafty and smart as he was. Now that he wasn't in constant pain, his face was always moving, his eyes looking around at every subtle move, usually his mouth running about something or other. He was not subtle about challenging anyone, least of all in a game with sugar on the line. And he could get twitchy, though John was betting that was the long day and the burn from the tattoo more than a tell.

"I'm thinking raise," Stiles announced. John glanced down at his stash and figured he could meet the raise. He wasn't tapped out yet, and if Teyla was going to let Ronon take her stash, maybe she'd let her CO bum a few if it got down to it.

"We're just gonna keep going around, huh?" John replied.

"He's bluffing," Rodney offered from behind the laptop screen. John blinked at him, tucking his cards closer to his chest.

"Excuse you, mind your own, McKay," ordered John. Stiles glanced between them, eyes narrowed. John shrugged and jerked his chin toward Rodney. "You're not even paying attention."

"You’re _contaminating_ my coffee supplies," Rodney grumbled. "The whole box! Do you _realize_ how much this hurts to watch?"

John smiled serene at the complaint. He had been sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair most of the night and was sore for it, so annoying Rodney with straight up black coffee in the morning sounded like fun.

Stiles tossed a few more sugar cubes in the pot. John and Ellison went along with it. Blair upped it again. Stiles balked and tossed in his last cubes. Sheppard met it, Ellison raised it, and Stiles folded with a glare. The three left with cards checked another round before they called the showdown. John was too stubborn to fold but too tired to waste more sugar cubes when none of them could have gone more than another round anyway short of pooling bets with those already out. Ronon was happily eating sugar cube candy so John doubted there would be much horse-trading from that corner anyway.

Sheppard's straight flush beat out Ellison’s full house, and Sandburg had a hand full of _nothing_ but a really big smile on his face at Stiles' indignant grumbling. Even Jim looked surprised that Blair had made it past Stiles' campaign with five worthless cards despite two exchanges.

"Bet that'll all look a lot different when it ain't for candy," Ronon observed, kicked back with his boot against Teyla’s chair, and eyeing Sandburg. John nodded his agreement and decided to call it.

"It's late. They gotta get home," he announced. He even forced himself to stand up, which was a painful enough endeavor. Carson had thankfully gone to his room by then though so he wasn’t fussed at. Teyla just patted his arm sympathetically before he moved out of reach. John went to the freezer and made himself an old fashioned ice cube ice pack for his shoulder.

"What’s on deck tomorrow?" Sheppard asked, looking to Blair and Ellison as they stood from the table.

"Some of us are running," Ellison said, a meaningful glance spared to Stiles. "First thing."

" _You’re_ benched," Blair said to Sheppard, in case that wasn't already obvious. "The Director wants Sentinel and Guides in the classroom at eight. Three sections before noon."

"Son of a bitch," muttered John.

"We'll try the range again in the afternoon though," added Jim. Shooting things sounded like a brilliant plan. As long as he could still lift his left arm. Sheppard just nodded.

"I think I need to go pass out then. Can't sleep it off in class when you're the teacher's pet, huh," he said.

"Good plan," said Blair, and John was sure Ellison would be catching him up on the walk home from the confusion on his face. By then, Rodney had figured out people were leaving and only reluctantly closed his laptop down. Whatever complaints he had been about to issue clamped right up when he saw the ice pack. The laptop and John's book were both scooped up.

"Out! Everyone! You don't have to sleep, but whatever you do, it's in your own rooms," McKay announced. He even waved the book out at people to get them moving toward the door instead of lingering around the table. John smirked at him from behind the kitchen island until Rodney stopped and pointed him toward the door, too.

"March, Colonel," came the order. John couldn’t quite manage a march with an icepack on his shoulder, but he was content to saunter, just to ruffle the man's feathers a little.

*~*~*


	42. Chapter 42

After two days, Stiles was remembering the whole torture of running for PE and lacrosse back at school, but Ellison wasn’t Finstock. For one thing, he answered his cellphone with a quick “ _Ellison_.” even though Blair was probably the only one who called him, given how the campus seemed to work; and for another, the word “ _cupcake_ ” was nowhere near the man’s vocabulary, probably ever. And, unlike school-related exercise, the run that morning had been a little bit, maybe kinda, actually fun.

Ronon and Derek had a race and Stiles really didn’t see anything at all of them except their backsides, and he ran alongside Teyla and refused to admit he enjoyed the view. Until they disappeared entirely into the preserve area, and Jim chased off after them, swearing about posted signs. Teyla made Stiles stick to the sidewalk, and Stiles figured out that he could still track them running with his hearing. It was actually more fun that way. He and Teyla tried to race them back to the campus but taking the shortcut through the woods was definitely a guaranteed win. They showed up to see the trio waiting by the door to the dorm, Ellison still trying to explain to Ronon why it was a good idea to stay on the trails and not destroy the fragile ecosystem of the area. Ronon just smirked at him.

The classes afterward were less fun, more _weird_. Director McMasters was there, supervising and not teaching, as the ten Sentinel students in the room had to work with their sense of smell and taste. The Guides had to document stuff on their stupid tablets, just as a way of making the team pay attention to different aspects of what some triggers could do to their senses.

The stuff in that class didn't just hit Stiles' sense of smell. Some of the bottles and sealed bags he had to stick his nose in made his face go numb, or started him coughing, others made his eyes water, and Derek's senses had absolutely no reaction to the same things. They were mostly just little corked bottles with numbers on them, no names, and part of the task was to identify the substance inside that caused the smells. It was hard work. Stiles sneezed a lot and Derek looked at him like he was losing it.

Sheppard and Rodney were at the table with them and it turned out that the Colonel had a lot of problems with citrus-based smells. The first time he came to a bottle that smelled like an orange, he gagged. He told Rodney not to touch the bottle and gave it over to Stiles to ask what it was.

"Orange, definitely. That's easy," said Stiles. Sheppard's eyebrows shot half-way up his forehead and he pointed to the mix of bottles they shared.

"Any of these others smell like that? Citrus family?" he asked. Stiles and Derek both started sorting out the bottles they had not yet gotten to in order to find the lemon and limey smelling things. Sheppard warily sniff-tested each one and had the same choking reaction to each as Rodney stared, mouth hanging open.

"Goddamnit, McKay," Sheppard complained. He scooped the offending bottles up into his shirt so he didn't even have to touch them and carried them away to some shelves near where Blair and Ellison stood out of the way. He stayed to talk to them, looking frustrated.

"What happened?" Derek asked, just as confused as Stiles was.

"He allergic or something?" Stiles added.

Rodney looked baffled. "No. _I_ am."

"Are you _shitting_ me?" blurted Sandburg across the room. Sheppard shushed him but they had already caught McMasters attention.

"Oh crap. Gotta go," muttered Rodney before chasing off to try to reach John before the Director did. Derek nudged Stiles' elbow and got him back to working on the bottles of smelling stuff.

"Sniff _and_ listen," Derek said quietly. So they did, because Stiles knew Derek could hear every word as clearly as he could, at least until Blair was leading them out of the room. The Director went with them, after sending Ellison to check on Stiles and Derek. Ellison dropped into the chair Sheppard had vacated across from them and leaned over the tabletop, head in his hands.

"What’s going on?" Stiles asked.

"They're going to the infirmary because McKay is deathly allergic to citrus and Sheppard got some of the stuff on his hands," said Ellison.

"Was he having problems from it?" Derek asked. Stiles started side eyeing the bottles, double checking their lids were screwed on right so he wouldn't be getting things on his hands.

"He doesn't know, he doesn't have allergies, so he's not sure if it's just a reaction to the smells or what," said Ellison. He rubbed at his forehead like he had a headache, then glanced at Derek. "You don't have any allergies, right?"

"Just aconite," said Stiles helpfully.

"That's not an allergy, stupid," said Derek. Stiles smacked his arm but was otherwise too distracted to care.

"So we just stick it out here?" he asked. Ellison nodded.

"He's probably fine. Finish this stuff and we'll check in before the next section," he said. Stiles frowned at the bottles and then looked over at Derek, not quite trusting his chances anymore. Derek picked up a bottle and held it in front of Stiles' face until he took it from him.

Nothing interesting was found in the rest of the bottles, except there was one that smelled like jasmine and vanilla and cherries and Stiles kind of wanted to keep it. There were some perfumes and synthetic smells, and some repeated smells, but there were layers to others that Stiles could have chased down if he tried hard enough. Which he _wasn't_ going to do because Sheppard had caught _allergies_ from his Guide and Stiles was feeling very twitchy about Derek suddenly.

The next section was a meditation class, which Stiles figured would be good for taking a nap in. But Ellison was still babysitting in Director McMasters' absence, and Stiles figured he didn't need to get the guy in trouble again. So he sat down on the mats on the floor like everybody else and tried to pay attention. It didn't help that this one was aimed at the Guides, with the instructor trying to explain the importance of protecting the mind from the constant exchange of unconscious information between Guide and Sentinel.

"Can we make the Daedalus take a meditation class?" Stiles asked dryly. Ellison stepped forward from his lean against the wall to smack Stiles up the back of the head. And that was about how that whole section went.

Sheppard and McKay caught up on the next one, with the Colonel looking none the worse for wear. Rodney had developed an apparently permanent frown, however, and John looked like he was in a mood to tear heads off of Barbie dolls in front of five year olds. But they showed up. They participated. The first time Rodney complained about something, John snapped at him cheerfully to _think positive about this fucked up situation_ and Stiles had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing out loud. Derek snorted and _then_ Stiles lost it.

The section was supposed to be focused on not relying on their vision only, about processing information from other sources, which took the entire class outside, back along the rabbit trail to the helicopter pad. And the instructor carried with them a box that they dropped loudly in the middle of the echoey landing area and then called on the Guides to retrieve one of what was contained inside.

Derek and Rodney came back carrying blindfolds.

"Huh," muttered Sheppard. "Kinky."

And Stiles had to turn and walk away from Derek for a minute so he didn't cause problems while the instructor, who seemed like a nice enough Guide from Texas or something, had to corral a dozen other people all thinking the same thing. He refused to let Derek put the blindfold on him though because he would have either started laughing or lost the battle with his imagination entirely.

The hard part came when the entire rest of the class was spent on the simple task of the blinded Sentinel _leading_ their Guide - who wasn't allowed to speak up for the exercise - back to the campus buildings.

"Nope, I don't like this," Stiles decided. He had run himself into a tree and didn't appreciate it. Mostly because Derek let him do it in the first place, and all Stiles could do was raise a hand to Derek’s chest and flip him off.

"Use the Force," Sheppard suggested soberly. "It's more fun."

And the Colonel was not wrong. Tapping into his senses became a lot easier when Stiles mentally scribbled " _The Force_ " on a piece of tape and stuck it across the dials dashboard in his head.

Around them was a lot of noise, other teams turning it into a Marco Polo sort of game and going nowhere. Somebody tripped on the box in the middle of the helicopter pad and Stiles gave them a failing grade for the day. He might have walked into a tree, but at least he didn't trip over something that everyone knew where it was.

"Hey... I think I got it," Stiles heard Sheppard say. He tugged on Derek's hand to move them closer to Sheppard's voice, completely fine with following the Colonel and being done with blindfolds.

"If it's better than shouting at trees, I'm game," Stiles said. Sheppard was quiet, though there was certainly shuffling of boots in the grass on the hill, movement, Rodney ordering John to stop moving before he tripped on something only Rodney could see at the moment. He wasn't supposed to talk, but it wasn't like he told him where to go, so it wasn't exactly cheating.

"Listen for the lights in the parking lot," Sheppard said to Stiles, much closer now. "The damn things buzz. A different frequency than the bugs around here."

Stiles listened and tried to sort it out from all the other sounds around him. He pulled out the sound of Derek breathing beside him and then tracked the different buzzing and trilling noises he could find from there. There was one that sounded like electricity rolling on metal and rattling it. Kinda like a lamp post.

"What about the _not walking into trees and falling on rocks_ part?" Stiles asked.

"Still working on that," said Sheppard. "Maybe sticks? Use touch that way." There was a pause and then Sheppard grumbled. "McKay, I can literally feel you glaring at me. You wanna break the rules again, by all means, share the thought."

Stiles heard a soft thwack of Rodney smacking the Colonel's leather jacket, but no scientific commentary was offered on the stick theory. So Stiles used his hearing to stay away from people, and walked slowly to make sure of his footing, and headed out further toward the buzzing lights sounds, with the hope of finding a stick along the way. Derek caught his shoulder and silently steered, slowed him down when he was going to miss an edge. It was a pretty open-ended assignment, and nobody swooped in to tell him they were breaking the rules, so Stiles rolled with it. Derek found him a suitable stick along the way, too, so Stiles swished and tapped and tried to get an idea of where the hazards were by the echo and the pushback of air.

It took forever, and Derek had to save him from a skidding fall down the hill at one point, but finally Stiles tripped over the sidewalk edge and felt concrete under his shoes. A second later he had the mask off his face and regretted it as sunlight hit his eyes. He stood and wobbled a minute as he adjusted from pitch black to noon sun.

"See, that wasn't so hard," said Derek, because he was an asshole. Stiles squinted at him, lifted a hand to flip him off for it, which took some focus considering he was still trying to adjust his vision.

"Stiles!"

"Oh shit," Derek said under his breath. He reached out and caught at Stiles' shoulder as the unknown voice finally registered for Stiles. Like flipping a switch, his vision darkened and sharpened, one of many ye olde benefits of _adrenaline_ , and he heard the panic from Derek loud and clear.

"Scott, keep back," Derek shouted back at the kid running toward Stiles from across the parking lot. To Stiles, he added, "We don’t let him screw this up, Stiles. Come on."

Stiles wasn't stupid. He couldn't take on a werewolf and wasn’t going to try, no matter how badly he wanted to. He leaned into the arm holding him back, though, an extra reminder that he couldn't handle the pain he had seen on Sheppard’s face the last few days.

Allison followed on Scott's heels, just to make everything worse, and Derek moved Stiles away from the trail back from the test. They had just finished it, damnit. Stiles had enjoyed having stupid little successes that took a lot more mental energy than he had expected, and Scott wasn't something he wanted to deal with after it.

"You know what, _no_. Not playing," Stiles said. He let up from Derek and started for the dorm as the closest building he could disappear into. Derek followed, confused but rolling with it since Stiles was not heading for Scott.

"Stiles! Wait!"

Stiles ran up the steps to the front doors and let himself in. Derek followed him up. Stiles went to the kitchen. Maybe he could convince himself he was hungry. Maybe there was a back door and he could just disappear into one of the other buildings. Maybe Scott would drop dead and leave him alone.

The sound of the lobby door opening was a big clue that the things Stiles wanted were not about to happen. He grabbed a knife from a chopping block and Derek caught it easily from his hand to put it away. Stiles glared at him and crossed his arms as Derek kept Stiles herded behind the kitchen island.

"Stiles? _Woah_ -" Scott caught the weird sound effects created by the shape and design of the building and he got quiet. But he still showed up in the kitchen doorway with Allison.

"Stiles, look, we just want to talk," Allison said quickly. Stiles nodded and shrugged, waving a hand in invitation as he leaned his elbows on the island and turned his attention to Scott.

"About what?" he asked with false cheer. "About the fact that you bit my dad? Or about the fact that you left him there for the Alphas to find him? Or about the fact that you left him there because you had to help Gerard figure out how to screw over Derek?"

Scott stopped at the edge of the island, surprised by Stiles' complaints summed up so neatly. So Stiles kept going.

"Or about, how, I dunno, even after you screwed over my dad, you helped destroy the entire department, you know, just the _place where I grew up_ , and after you handed Derek up to Gerard like a puppet, _I still_ got locked up in the goddamn basement with Erica and Boyd to get my ass kicked because I didn't know your plans. After _all that_. What exactly do you think we have to talk about anymore, Scott? I kinda lost my spot on the lacrosse team. _And_ my house. _And_ my dad."

Scott stared at him, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. "Look, Stiles, man, I didn't mean to leave him there. Peter said he would help him... I had to go-"

Scott _had to go_ meet up with Gerard, so he left his dad with _Peter fucking Hale_.

Werewolf or not, Stiles charged around Derek to slam into Scott, using the lower center of gravity trick he had seen Sheppard use on Daniel. Whether by surprise or design, it worked, and Stiles slammed him back against the wall and got to deck him across the face just _once_. It hurt like hell. But it felt _really_ good.

Then Derek was on him, dragging him back like he was just fifty pounds of dead weight.

"Stilinski! Stand down!" Sheppard showed up then and he moved to block Scott from going after Stiles or Derek. He had a black bladed knife in his hand to defend himself but otherwise was just a tall guy in camo standing in the way.

"Who are you?" Scott demanded, surprised and angry and, Stiles realized happily, still working his jaw like the punch had actually _hurt_.

"Lt. Colonel John Sheppard. _His_ CO," replied Sheppard without missing a beat, pointing to Stiles even though he mostly faced off with Scott. "So I want this conversation to jack down to civilized or I'll be the guy kicking _you_ out on your ass."

"He can leave," said Stiles, shrugging loose of Derek's hold. " _Anytime_."

And Sheppard, because he was apparently a jerk like Derek, looked to Stiles' _Guide_ rather than take his word for it. Stiles looked back to see Derek shaking his head and, since he was still right behind him, Stiles dragged an elbow into his gut for the betrayal.

"Stiles! Sit your ass down!" Sheppard pointed to the table. "Cool off and _then_ I'll hear you out."

Derek wasn't fazed by the weak attack and steered Stiles toward the table. Stiles moved but he glared at Derek for it. Sheppard kept his attention on Scott and Allison. "You two, out in the hall."

"We came to see Stiles," argued Scott.

" _That's_ nice. You're trespassing and he doesn't want to _see you_ , so who do you want to talk to? Me or the cops?" Sheppard replied. He risked another trip to the infirmary to drag Scott away from the wall and shoved him toward the door. Allison dodged out of the way and Sheppard herded her out and stood in the doorway, boot on the jamb by the door and shoulder on the other to block it off. He pointed them back a few feet.

"So there you go. You can see each other," said the Colonel, angled so he could keep an eye on both parties. "This is as close as you get."

"I want to talk to my friend," said Scott.

"You're about six months late on that, Scott," replied Sheppard. "In case you didn't hear him just a minute ago, cleaning up after you cost him more than you'd be willing to pay. Words are cheap at this point."

"I don't know you," Scott said, squaring up slightly. John held the knife up just enough to remind him it was there.

"And I know just enough about you to _use_ this if you get near this door again. He can hear you just fine. So you can talk all you want from right there. If you think you have some words that can fix his having to start over, go for it. But you've got two minutes to figure it out before you start wasting his time. We've got shit to do that's not this."

"He doesn't have to start over," Scott said. "The Alphas left. We can fix things now, like we always do. Back at home. I've got the pack, Allison's working on the stuff with Gerard..." Scott turned his attention to Stiles. "Come on, man. I was trying to help. I thought it would work out in the end, and it did. They left..."

" _Yeah_ , asshole? Where's my dad?" Stiles asked. But he stayed at the table, slouched over it with his arms on the surface, using the feel of the cold tabletop to cool his anger and his sense of touch to distract from the fact that he was glaring and focused on Scott. Stiles wasn't going to zone out because he was angry when anger could sometimes make him panic.

Scott seemed to get stuck on that. "Look, Stiles. I'm sorry, okay? I- we can fix it, okay? We can find them. We'll do better next time, because we'll have you."

John looked back at Stiles then, looking no more sold on the promise than Stiles was. They could both tell Scott thought he was telling the truth. Stiles lifted his hand to wave Sheppard's attention back to Scott.

"I told you. He stopped listening," Stiles said.

The Colonel gave a slight nod before he looked over at Scott again. "Maybe try email," he suggested. He waved his hand to get Scott to back off. "Stiles and Derek signed up with my team. So this _going back_ thing, not happening. If that's all you're after-"

"I want my friend back!" Scott returned, all but shouting. He made to move past Sheppard and the Colonel blocked him off with the flat of the knife to his chest. Stiles watched, his anger with Scott warring with years of keeping his friend alive. He stood up and moved, enough of a distraction to get Scott to back off and stop challenging the Colonel. Derek moved to shadow him, probably expecting to have to tackle him again.

Stiles stopped a few feet from the door and had no intentions to get within arms reach. Just close enough that Scott could see his face and maybe pay attention this time. Maybe he would see Stiles was done. That he was tired of everything Scott's pack brought to the game for him. Maybe he could look Stiles in the face and realize that Stiles wasn't going to play anymore.

"Scott... My _dad_ told me to leave town and never go back. So nobody can _make him kill me_. Okay? _My dad_. So I’m gonna listen to _my dad_ for once," he said. "Instead of you. Nothing you can say fixes anything. I don't want to go back because there’s nothing there for me anymore and whether you meant to or not, Scott, _you_ made it that way. So go home. Be the alpha. Be better. But do it without me."

"Without us," added Derek. He looked warily at Allison and Stiles saw the anger flash on her face briefly. He caught at Derek's wrist to keep him tucked behind him. Then Stiles shifted his attention to Scott again.

"If you need a Hale, you can work with Cora. If you're smart, you'll stay away from Peter," he said, the piece of advice the only neutral ground he would offer. Scott was playing with fire being the go-between of the Hales and Argents, and Stiles knew that well enough. And that would never again be Stiles' problem.

Scott started to argue again. "I only asked-"

"Scott. _Go away._ And don't come back here again, I mean it. We're leaving and we won't be here if you do," Stiles said. He pointed to the door hanging open opposite where Sheppard stood. A fire door that would at least hurt a lot for Scott to break through. "I will close this in your _face_. I want you to leave."

Sheppard stood up from his slouch blocking the door so Stiles could follow through on his promise, shoving Scott back because he was still at an apparent loss for how to weasel a winning argument out of the shitshow he had made of Stiles' life over the last year. Stiles reached out with a foot and kicked away the doorstop to let the door close on its own. Derek followed it closed and leaned against it to keep it that way for a few minutes. Stiles slouched back against it to help, but mostly as an excuse to stand in Derek's space and be still.

*~*~*

The kid glowered at the closed door behind Sheppard. Scott looked angry now and John knew well enough he was in a bad spot, standing bodily between a werewolf and something they wanted. But he didn't want to think about the kind of official trouble he would be in if the kid tried to go _through_ the door, either.

"Look. You fucked up, kid, that's just where this is at," Sheppard told him plainly. "And now you've got a choice. You can walk away because you hurt him and your friend asked you to respect that and leave him alone. Maybe you can salvage things later. Or you can keep being the asshole he doesn't want to see, keep ignoring him, and the cops bust you for trespassing. With nobody to take the heat for it this time."

"What the hell do you know," returned Scott. He was bitter about it, and he smelled like an angry werewolf, but there was grief there, too. Sheppard shrugged.

"A helluva lot more than you, on a lot of things," John replied. "And right now, I know you're making everybody's life more difficult than it should be. Including your own. He asked you to leave. Respect that. If you can't, you aren't his friend."

It finally seemed to get through and Scott gave up. Sheppard was able to escort the two teenagers outside without a fight. He even risked putting the knife back in the sheath at his belt. Allison Argent kept shooting angry faces at him over her shoulder, but Scott had her by the elbow and was moving them out under his own steam.

They made it outside and Scott stopped on the steps, almost like he wanted to go back in, but Sheppard still blocked the door. The kid looked annoyed still, angry, but curious, too.

"Why does it sound different in there?" he asked.

"It was designed for people with sensitive hearing. Like Stiles," Sheppard replied. "Maybe you missed it, but he got hurt playing with the Alphas. He adapted to it and now he's online as a Sentinel. Which means that if he were to get bit, he _would_ die. Do not pass G _o_. The genetics are not compatible."

It finally seemed to sink in that Sheppard wasn't some idiot adult. Scott’s eyebrows went half way up his forehead. John just nodded. "I told you I knew things."

John spotted Rodney hurrying to keep up with Ronon and Teyla, the three of them coming back from the main building. The pair looked like they had been going rounds in the gym. And Ronon looked pissed.

"And there's the Goon Squad. That's your cue to get gone, Scott," said Sheppard.

"Oh no," said Allison. Sheppard tracked her attention and saw Chris Argent getting out of an SUV out in the parking lot.

"Son of a bitch, what the hell happened? Somebody put an ad in the damn paper?" Sheppard complained. He herded the two down from the steps, toward Argent because there was no other alternative as the man approached. He wasn't that much older than John, about McKay’s height, and he had seemed pretty level headed when John had dealt with him before. Given the fact he had driven two and a half hours to harass a kid, John was reconsidering that assessment.

"They're just leaving," Sheppard informed the man, nodding to the two teenagers.

"Where's Stiles?" Argent asked.

Sheppard scoffed at that. "What the hell do you care?"

"He's safer with us," said Argent. "Whatever this place is, it's wide open for trouble. Doesn't look much like a military base."

"Obviously," agreed Sheppard. "And I tell you what, I would kill for a couple MPs right now."

Ronon showed up then, jumping up the steps to stand behind John. Teyla stayed on the sidewalk, a few feet away, just as much of a human blockade as Ronon could be. John nodded. "These guys'll do the trick."

Argent narrowed his eyes, watching Sheppard and his team with banked frustration.

"What is your problem, huh?" Argent wanted to know. "You show up and just _take a kid_ -"

" _Really_? You want the moral high ground here?" Sheppard replied. "Trust me, you don't have it. None of you. Stiles just told Scott that. I have no problems backing him up on this."

"You don't know Stiles," said Allison. "He'll come around. He should come home and we can-"

"If I'm not mistaken, it's _your_ home he was in when someone decided they needed to _torture_ the guy for information he didn't have," cut in Sheppard, anger finally hitting his voice. "And he’s made it a goddamn point not to have that information ever since. But hey, if you want Scott, he's right here. You don't need Stiles anymore."

"That wasn't any of us," said Chris Argent. The supposed _adult_. John tilted his head as he stared at the man, tried to puzzle out his angle.

"Yeah? He's a kid! What'd you do to stop it?" he asked. There would be no answer to that. John shook his head, stepping forward to try backing the group toward the parking lot and their cars.

"Here's the thing. I show up in town and within _five minutes_ , with _basic_ ordnance, my team takes down a problem that's been _kicking your ass_ for months. You're welcome, by the way," Sheppard said, not feeling all that generous just then. "And now you wanna stand here and tell me that you give two shits about any of these kids that you dragged through it all that time? I don't think so. _You_ could have ended it and you didn’t. Too busy playing games with monsters that don't exist."

Argent gave an unamused laugh as Scott shuffled back a step, surprised. "They do exist," said Argent.

"No," said Sheppard. "Monsters don't exist. _People_ exist. All kinds. And some of them can be _real_ shitheads. You just gotta be a better shot than the ones that wanna eat you. The rest of 'em'll leave you alone. Makes it pretty simple."

"You don't know much," said Argent, shaking his head.

Sheppard crossed his arms, shrugged indifferently. "I know I don't have to lock _kids_ in basements and hit 'em with cattle prods to leave my mark on the world."

Argent did not seem to like that but he kept back. "They're _not_ just kids."

"That’s where you're all wrong. It's a lot simpler when you've got good guys and bad guys to choose from. Makes it real easy to _pick a side_. The side that doesn't beat up on kids, that's generally the good guys," said John. "And if you want to get anything done in that weird little town, start working _with_ the kids. My team did. Kids can do some pretty amazing things when the adults get out of their damn way."

"Fine. Then send Stiles back with us so we can start working on that. Him and Scott patch things up and get _Derek_ away from him-" Allison tried to jump in and Sheppard just shook his head at her.

"Stilinski is a member of my team. _As such_ , he has been _legally_ remanded to my custody," he said, looking from face to face to end up back on Chris. "The kids can keep in touch long-distance, if they want. And you'll have to sort out your own problems with that like a goddamned adult."

Chris Argent seemed to be plenty irritated with Sheppard then, based on the faint color showing up on his face. _Good_. "You can leave now."

Of all the sources of attack Sheppard might have expected just then, it admittedly wasn’t from Allison. The girl stepped smoothly around her father, as if steering him away, and instead she slapped Sheppard sharply across the face. John ducked belatedly, surprised most by the sting over the werewolf stripes. He blinked it off as Teyla shouldered in front of him. Ronon moved forward in full threat, and Argent wisely collected his daughter and herded her toward the car.

"Go home, Scott," Argent ordered, leaving the werewolf to fend for himself. Ronon stood in the place Argent had vacated and stared down at the young werewolf, one hand on his holster and the other on his knife, and Sheppard wasn't in the mood to steer him away from either option.

Scott finally turned and left. By then, Argent had loaded his daughter into the passenger side of his SUV and the girl was _already_ angrily typing something into her phone.

"Well. That was entertaining," Sheppard muttered. "Let's all go write home about it."

"Crap, am I gonna have to write another report?" Rodney asked, standing at John's shoulder now that there wasn't a werewolf in close proximity.

"No. Not telling Sandburg about this, so no report," said John. McKay frowned but accepted it with a nod. John watched to be sure both the SUV and the small hatchback left the lot.

"Come on. Let's go get our kid and see if he can shoot," Sheppard said, looking to Ronon and Teyla. "If Ellison could talk McMasters into it, anyway."

"Do they have P90s?" Teyla asked. Sheppard doubted it, but he definitely missed them as much as she seemed to. He shrugged and shot her a smile.

"You need to get some ice-" Rodney began.

"Okay, fine, lunch first," Sheppard said as he turned to head back into their unit's dorm pod. He caught Rodney’s hand in his to try to get him back down from the anxiety. Maybe the Guide knew more than the Sentinel could read at the moment. "And ice. And... smelly stuff."

*~*~*


	43. Chapter 43

Even after the adventure in the parking lot, John didn't let Rodney skip out on the range training. Mostly because they didn't have a proper range on Atlantis. This was the only chance they had to actually see how Rodney could do, because when he did have to fire off-world, there was usually chaos and who knew if Rodney ever actually hit anything.

It turned out alright, but John still got frustrated watching him try to put the gun back together after showing him how to clear it and unassemble it for problems, or, god forbid, simple care and maintenance of a weapon.

"This is not my thing," Rodney tried to tell him, watching in annoyance as Stiles stripped the weapon he was using and then reassembled it like someone was timing him.

"No, but - McKay, pretend this is literally any other piece of technology. If this was a piece from the comms console of a Jumper, you could have it torn apart and put back together. Wouldn't think twice," John pointed out.

"Yeah, it's a _gun_ ," replied Rodney. "Big difference."

"It's a metal frame and springs at best," returned John. "And don't try to hit me with some pacifist bullshit. You build _bombs_. In your _sleep_. Big ones. That kill many, _many_ things."

"Yes, but I don't point them at _me_ ," said Rodney. "Or give them to other people to point at me, I should say."

"But if you point these at people _better_ than they point them at you, you win," offered Stiles. He was happily distracted taking the gun apart again. "Make sure the sight's right, make sure everything works, otherwise the bad guy gets the drop on you because _his_ didn't break."

John blinked and then pointed at Stiles. "Yes! That. What he said."

"Oh." Rodney looked down at the gun on the table in front of him. He could fit pieces back together better than anybody. So he attacked the mess of parts again and built the gun. John handed him the magazine and pointed him toward the firing line.

"So test it then," he said. Rodney determinedly set about to do as ordered and sent the target sheet down to the end of the range. There were five rows for the range, so Stiles, Derek, and Blair each set up their own area.

Blair knew the basics, and Ellison and John just wanted him to brush up on proficiency, because of obvious reasons. It was probably pushing their luck that Rodney was as bad off after two years as he was and they didn't need to worry about another Guide who didn't like guns. Even though Blair really was a pacifist, who wore jade with his military uniform to balance his karma or some New Agey crap like that.

Ronon worked with Derek because the werewolf with claws and fangs had almost no experience with guns, other than having hunters point them at him, chase him with them, and shoot him apparently frequently. Ronon just got pissed off at that point and the old soldier in him was out and working on Hale from then on.

In contrast, Stiles had gone hunting with family - for actual game, not other humans - since he was about seven and he reported that his dad had always made sure the kid could behave himself around guns because they had always been in the house and Stiles wasn't the kind to be kept out of locked safes. At least he was honest. Rodney figured he was going to have to disable Atlantis' access to a few door locks to keep Stiles out of the armory, _at least_.

When all was ready and it was time to shoot, Teyla took up the last row, because Ellison wanted the noise to screw with John and Stiles' senses and she could time her shots however it was Ellison had told her to. Ellison made sure the others all wore headgear, even Ronon. There was always a shot going off between the five of them on the line, with barely any recovery time between one round and another.

John stood just behind and to the side so Rodney knew where he was, and after the first round of firing on the line, he wavered a little and set his hand to Rodney's back, angled a little closer. It was a distraction, but Rodney managed to hit the target anyway. And John didn't zone out. It was a success all around, ignoring the four shots that went very, very wide up on the target. John patted Rodney’s shoulder and grinned at him.

"Hey, you got the bad guy you were aiming at, and some good gut-shots on his two buddies behind him," he said. Rodney rolled his eyes and pushed the button to recall the target sheet from the other end of the room.

*~*~*

Shooting at the basement range had been fun, a release of some built up tension and a throwback to something Stiles hadn’t gotten to do in two years. After the run-in with Scott, it helped. His hand still hurt like hell and he was going to have to ice it, but it was _worth it_. Stiles could shoot left-handed almost as well as right, and he was really, really okay with the definite improvement on his aim. Every shot hit center-mass, except for the first couple, which were screwed up because he hadn't dialed it down enough, even with the protective gear over his ears.

"Good shooting, kid," said Ellison. "We got a natural."

"I wanted to be a Fed. So Dad taught me," Stiles replied, grinning a little.

And it didn't hurt as much as it should have to say that. His dad had taught him to shoot, and now it was something that would help him get away from Beacon Hills, like his dad wanted. It wasn't perfect. But it was maybe the first thing that felt okay to think about his dad in months. His dad wasn't dead. His dad could figure out the werewolf thing. And anything after that, no one could say where things would be in a few months. But Stiles was still his dad's kid, and a good shot. He could run with that.

Stiles sent down another target sheet with everyone else, and they worked through a few more magazines on the line. Ellison changed it up, testing them on it, yelling out orders to fire or hold, so that the two Sentinel had to monitor the dials to be sure they heard Ellison between shots.

By then, Sheppard stood at the line, in the bay Teyla had forfeited, up against the wall so it echoed right in John's ear. That would suck. Stiles was so glad he had grabbed the middle one. He easily snooped on Derek's target, compared it to Rodney's and Blair's. Blair was the best shot of the three of them, and Derek's target looked almost the same as Rodney’s.

It wasn’t just about seeing the target clearly, but coordinating between what they saw and how they aimed. It was kind of crazy to think that Derek's hand-eye coordination might be a little off because he used it so differently than Stiles did. Stiles was so used to the notion that werewolf reflexes made everything better, but maybe not the less physical stuff they didn't use as much.

Ellison called an end to it eventually, but Stiles realized he was actually worn out by then anyway. Colonel Sheppard looked pretty well beat down by the work he had put into it, too. The heightened senses thing was unfairly exhausting, but Blair said that was only because it was still new to them. Like any other situation, the body had to acclimate and learn, build a kind of strength to know how to default to the right settings. And Sentinel were fighting a default that was set way too high, so reprogramming that was going to take time.

"So we can do this again, right?" Stiles asked. Ellison nodded.

"Running in the morning, shooting in the afternoon, until we're out of here," the Captain said. Stiles could pass on the running, but he would take it if it meant range time.

"That doesn't include the scientists, right?" Rodney asked. "I really should be working on an answer to the Daedalus problem..."

"Running, no, range, _yes_ ," replied Sheppard. He stood up a little taller, in case he had to bully Rodney about it. Rodney mumbled his annoyance but accepted his promised fate.

They had to show up for two more class sections that afternoon, mostly Guide stuff. Stiles and John just had to be present and accounted for. Sheppard spent most of it hiding behind his sunglasses and barely awake. Stiles tried to pay attention, but it was talking a lot of probabilities and hypothetical scenarios that were supposed to show the real world applications. None of them mentioned _aliens_ , so Stiles figured it wasn't really applicable to him. Derek had his brand new, Project assigned iPad out on the desk, not being used, so Stiles snuck it into his lap to see if he could put any games on it.

It took a few minutes, but somebody noticed. Blair got tagged in as the babysitter and he showed up over Stiles' shoulder to slip the iPad away from him and put it back in front of Derek. The instructor at the front of the room shifted away from their lecture to add in a not-so-casual reminder that the Guides were responsible for the content of the tablets and they should be kept password protected.

"Should have considered that before signing us toys that a nine year old could hack," Rodney said, relatively quiet considering it was Rodney. Sheppard reached over to thwack Rodney’s knee for it, but that was probably for waking him up more than smarting off. Stiles snorted and curled forward to hide his face over the table. Derek was glaring at him, Stiles knew without looking up, but he wasn’t facing the generalized embarrassment with a room full of Marines staring at him. At least McMasters wasn't supervising them this time.

Blair sent Stiles and Sheppard quite literally to their rooms when the class let up, but he did clarify that it was because they were very obviously tired after the day already, not because they were completely terrible students.

"I'm fine, I caught some z's in there," mumbled Sheppard. Blair rolled his eyes.

"That's _literally_ my point," he said. "It's a class. You're _supposed_ to be paying attention. Not sleeping."

"There's always osmosis," said Sheppard with as much innocence as he could muster. Ellison flicked him upside the back of his head for it.

"But the class was aimed at the Guides. How were we supposed to know it was stuff for us?" Stiles asked.

"They're _all_ aimed at the Guides," Derek pointed out quietly. "Didn't you hear the Director yesterday? Sentinel are all a bunch of ADHD headcases who can't pay attention, that's why the Guides have to clean up after them. Learn everything for them."

Rodney dropped a shade somehow paler than his usual. "What? _I'm_ the one with- did she say that? _Really_?"

Sheppard grimaced and nodded. Rodney’s mouth clamped shut and he looked to Blair. "Requesting permission to run away and go home now."

"No, you stay and you learn stuff," said Sheppard. He stepped closer, in Rodney's space to reassure him. "I'll take the _other_ ADHD headcase to work it out. We can recap what I slept through or something, and then you can take notes for us on this one."

"That's a good idea," said Ellison. "Go walk them through this stuff, Chief. I'll get these two through this last one. We'll meet up and get dinner going after."

Blair nodded acceptance of the idea. "Switching up the environment will probably help. Come on, guys."

Stiles started to follow as Blair and Sheppard left, but Derek caught him with an arm around his neck to pull him back into a sideways hug. Stiles leaned on him a little but he was mostly more interested in sulking just then than he was being comforted. Derek kissed his jaw anyway before letting him go, and Stiles reluctantly left to catch up with Blair and John.

*~*~*

"You know, a month ago, I was prepared to mutiny on my own damn ship if somebody told me I couldn't get rid of this ProX stuff," Sheppard said as they walked toward the dorms. He was angry and venting but quiet about it at least. "And now I'm actually good with it. I can figure this out. It will work. But this place makes me want to mutiny on a whole 'nuther planet."

Blair patted him on the shoulder. "I hear you, man."

"This program is set up to kill just... everything that makes this manageable," John added. Blair nodded. He pointed them away from the dorm.

"Second thought, we're walking this off," Blair decided. He caught Stiles by the elbow to get him walking in the right direction and Sheppard bit back on the argument he had been forming. Stiles probably did need to be moving. It had been a few hours since Scott had driven off, so hopefully the kid was smart enough to have actually left town. They should be okay on a _walk_.

"Listen, like you said, it's temporary," Blair said. "You aren't stuck here for the full program. Imagine how insane you'd be at the end of it, then multiply that by five, and you'll get to where Jim and I are since the Board adopted the Guide Priority policies."

"And that would be why the mutiny," replied Sheppard, nodding. "Normal _humans_ don't treat other people like this. Even in boot-camp, they yell at you to your face."

"Yeah, well, welcome back to Earth, I guess," said Blair. He shook his head and shoved his hands in his pockets. "They've found this gets them the machine they want. So it's here."

Sheppard kicked a rock off the sidewalk, back toward the preserve, and Stiles jumped over it.

"Where are we going?" Stiles asked. Blair shrugged.

"Somewhere _not_ inside," he said. "Just for an hour and a half."

"Don't you live around here?" Stiles asked.

"That would be _inside_ ," Sheppard pointed out helpfully. Stiles nodded.

"Yes, after an extended period of _outside_ , in order to get there. Unless they live in a tree," replied Stiles, jumping to reach a branch that stretched out over the sidewalk. "There's plenty of those around here."

And so, because Stiles was openly nosy, Blair pointed them toward wherever he and Ellison lived. He also gave them the rundown on how to avoid frying out their Guides with the bad juju created by over-stressing their systems. It was as simple as not being stupid, mostly, and not picking fights with werewolves two days in a row, just because they could walk around with the dials muted. The rest was meditation, focused self-control.

"Listen, I'm gonna get angry, and I gotta lie about it, that's just part of the job," John began. "You can't negotiate with... backwards people, and let them know just how screwed up they are. You have to keep that part turned off. And you haven't seen Rodney in his labs. That man has no off switch at all..."

"I'm not saying you have to be zen or something... Jim's got a temper. A mean one. But look where we work. He had to figure out what to do with that, just for his own sanity, man," said Blair. "It's when it turns into pea soup in your head and you start _broadcasting_ that at the rest of us, it's gonna... get toxic. And there’s three of us who can pick up on it."

"So? What do we do about it?"

"Pay attention. That's all you can do until you start to figure out what this stuff... _feels_ like. There's stuff at play here that we have no idea how it happens. Let alone have the words for it. You just kinda... experience it, and learn, and that part just takes _time_ , unfortunately," said Blair, talking with his hands again. "I frankly can't even try to explain some of the things- you wouldn't believe me."

Stiles jumped ahead of them then and started walking backward in front of them along the wide sidewalk, making sure he had Blair's attention. He waved a hand between them adamantly.

"Look at me, dude. And say the word _werewolf_. Out _loud_. And then try to tell me something I _won't_ believe," said Stiles. They were in a touristy area now, so Stiles at least kept his voice down. John admitted the kid had a point there.

"Add _wraith_ in there as a coda," said John. Blair just shook his head. They had gotten to the marina with the little boutique tourist shops and he stopped in front of a storefront art shop. Blair held open a door next to the shop, that opened to a narrow hall, with mailboxes on the wall near it, and doors that said _MANAGEMENT ONLY_ on either side of the hall off at the back. A stairway led up, and a sketchy looking elevator door took up the far back wall.

"You live over a store?" Stiles asked. "Really?"

"Really," said Blair. "Kinda tiny, but not terrible."

"Tiny's cool. I live in a dorm I don't pay for," Stiles pointed out. Sheppard scoffed at that as he followed them up the steps, shaking his head. He lived in a tiny tin can of a hotel room in a floating city, in another galaxy, but there was no way he could make that sound right to guys who had never seen it.

"No, you're just between mailing addresses at the moment," he said instead. Stiles looked back at him.

"I can get mail?"

"Not reliably. I'd stick to email," John told him, hand held up and wobbling to show it was a bad idea. Blair let them into the tiny apartment then, a wave of his hand the only fanfare.

"Sorry, electric's off already, so you're stuck with the daylight," he said.

"It's quiet in here," said Stiles. It was also pretty empty. Sure, there was furniture, much more comfortable than the stuff at the campus, but there wasn’t any of the bookshelves or the crazy artifacts that cluttered Blair's office. There were some pictures on the wall, and a big kitchen, all things that seemed very much like Ellison’s influence. But other than the smiling faces in the photos, there wasn’t much of the place that said Sandburg lived there.

"We, uh, paid for some renovations when we first got here, yeah," said Blair. "Just kinda stole the ideas from the campus buildings and redid the floors. And the walls. And the ceiling."

"We get the point," said John, amused. Stiles snooped over to some photos on the wall, including a trio of a magazine cover and the article that went with it.

"Holy crap. This is Ellison?" he asked.

"Looks like him," replied John. Blair just nodded.

"Yeah. That was when his senses came online the first time," he said. "He was stuck in Peru for a year, the only surviving member of his team, defending a tribe in the jungle. Came back a hero to a medical discharge because nobody knew how to help him with his senses."

"I wasn't even alive yet," Stiles realized.

"I hate to break it to you, Stiles, but you are still just a kid," said Sheppard.

"Yeah, but he's _old_ ," said Stiles. "I didn't think he was _that_ old." And Blair and John both choked on the unexpected laughter from the guileless observation.

All three of them startled when the unlocked front door was kicked open with a crash. John was closest to Blair and grabbed his arm to pull him further away from the door. He reached for the holster that wasn’t on his leg because he had been on the campus for almost a week and relieved from duty for a month longer than that. No guns. The best he had was a knife. And that was more than the other two had. Sheppard kept Blair behind him, and Stiles backed toward them, as very much armed men in urban fatigues filed into the apartment.

"What the hell is this?" Sheppard demanded.

"Someone wants to see you," came the annoyingly vague reply from a man who pointed a Beretta right at John.

"Good for them. They can make an appointment like everyone else," said Sheppard. Big talk for an unarmed man facing a full six man team quite well stocked for battle.

"Appointment is made, we're just your taxi," the man said, smug about it. Sheppard scanned the men and found that three of them had Zat guns tucked in their holsters. The fact that the men had Zat guns in their possession was concerning, but the fact that they were relying on their semiautomatic weapons when they had Zat guns probably meant they weren't comfortable with the alien tech and were much more likely to make someone disappear.

"Fine," said Sheppard, bitter and angry about the unignorable conclusion he had logicked himself into. He held his hands up to show no threat. "Since you asked so nice, we'll go."

"Hey, _what_ , no-" stammered Stiles, backing away from the nearest gunman angling toward him. Sheppard whistled sharply to derail the kid’s protest and get his attention.

"Stiles. That's an order. Get over here, and we'll all go along peaceful-like," said Sheppard. Stiles scowled at him for the assault on his hearing but he moved closer, and Sheppard caught him by the arm to keep him in front. Stiles tried to shrug him off but John slung an arm over his shoulder and pulled him back, arm over his collar like a hug. He ducked his head to Stiles' ear and whispered, " _Listen_ , damnit."

Stiles nodded barely and John let him go. John pulled Blair forward then so he could keep an eye on the both of them as the team closed ranks around them to clear a path to the door. There was nothing about this situation that John was comfortable with, and he adjusted the dials defensively. He was trying to track six bad guys with his hearing, and keep tabs on Blair and Stiles. And Sandburg had gone strangely silent, aside from the rabbiting heartbeat. He was scared, Stiles was terrified, and it was fair to say that, even with the dials turned down, John was in plenty enough pain already to be concerned.

The smart-ass with the Beretta stepped forward, the gun tucked away and secured in his holster before he dragged John back from the other two and searched him for weapons. All John had was the knife and it was tossed on the couch Sheppard had been shoved against, just enough to throw his balance off and keep it that way. The man grabbed his wrist like handcuffs were about to get involved, and John jerked free and dragged his right elbow across the man's face for it. There was movement behind him, a strange metallic hissing primed up, and John looked over his shoulder to see one of the others had pulled out the Zat gun. John held his hands up quickly.

"No need for that..." he said, turning carefully. The man he had hit came back then, smug grin replaced by a scowl, and looped one handcuff around his right wrist so he could keep it from attacking again. Then he took off the Velcro brace on Sheppard’s left wrist, tossed the brace to the couch, and closed the cuffs around the injured wrist, too. John bit his tongue on complaining about it. The dials would have to take care of it.

Blair and Stiles were handled next, checked and cuffed, and then marched toward the door. Down the stairs, and out the alley entrance by the elevator. Nice and neat. No trouble.

John saw two vehicles waiting, which was lucky. He angled his way in front of Blair and Stiles, loitering in between them and the van as their babysitters split up. One of the uniforms grabbed Sheppard's arm to help him into the van. John looked away, catching Stiles' attention.

"Stiles," he said, just barely a whisper. "Run."

He heard Stiles panic for a beat before he heard the kid's shoes shift on the pavement. Sheppard slammed into the man in the uniform next to him, pinning him against the edge of the van door. With one stunned, he kicked out at the one next to Blair, and suddenly Stiles had a clear path as the third man tried to interfere in the fight. Stiles spun and ran down the back access road behind the shops.

Blair took the opportunity and the both of them took off. Better odds that way. John tried another bodycheck against the van and it mostly worked, it just hurt like hell when he had three guys pile on right after it. That was three guys who weren't chasing after Blair and Stiles, so Sheppard took it as a win. Rodney and Carson were gonna kill him, though.

Stiles disappeared around the corner of the row of buildings but Blair didn’t make it that far. He was shoved into the van alongside John a minute later, smelling like the oils and trash of the alley from when he had been jumped on and taken down. The door was slammed and John winced as the sound reverberated through his brain and down into his busted wrist. He let it pass, waiting for more, but nothing came.

“You okay?” Sheppard asked, already way too used to snooping on the people around him to recognize the differences between the guy who had walked with him the half mile from the campus and the Guide who had just been tackled to the ground fifteen feet away from him.

“Yeah, this is great, man,” Blair said mildly, still trying to catch his breath. John nodded and left it alone. Things were quiet in the van until the front door slammed and the engine started up. The front passenger jumped in, and the back door opened to let in someone else to sit on the short bench seat mounted to the wall on the other side of the van. The door was hardly closed before the van was lurching away. John tried to keep track of the streets rushing by outside the windows, familiar enough with the area from his days wandering the Bay back in school that maybe he could figure out where they ended up on the other side of the ride.

“Just for the record,” he said, calm and cool like random kidnappings happened every day. “This wasn’t my fault.”

Blair rolled his eyes and nodded. “Probably not.”

*~*~*

Running in handcuffs was not the easiest thing to do. Stiles rammed his shoulder into the side of two buildings by accident just trying to turn a corner. He had gone running with the others enough that he could orient himself enough to get back to the preserve. Between Sheppard, Blair, and that small familiarity, Stiles made it to the preserve that backed the campus and started climbing the tree-dense hillside.

He made it to the helicopter pad at the top, covered in leaves and dirt from the slips and falls in the mud, and no urban camo uniforms showed up to pounce on him. He was out of breath and still going.

This was bad. Very bad. So much his fault, too. Stiles was mostly angry by the time he made it to the buildings and he crashed up against the swinging glass doors to let himself in. He found himself looking for Derek again and the urgency and panic of the last ten minutes was a buzz on the edge of his senses, bringing everything to the forefront. The mud on his skin itched, the smell of the leaves was overwhelming, and the uniformed marines loitering in the hall, staring at him like he was crazy, didn't help. Stiles wanted to focus his hearing and find Derek, but it was a soundproof building and the zone out was too close, almost tempting to fall into.

Stiles forced himself to stop. Stop moving, stop listening, stop thinking. He stood in the hall and stared back at the uniformed pair of Marines nearest to him.

"I need Captain Ellison... Captain Sandburg was taken. Kidnapped. Whatever. Needs help..." he managed to say, panting like he had just run a half mile, with at least half of it being uphill, in the muddy woods. " _And_ Colonel Sheppard..."

Mentioning rank caused a scramble as the Marines scattered to go find Ellison. One team moved to check on Stiles, treating him less like a lost bum in their halls and now more like somebody who needed help. One of them said something about going to find security and the other carefully set a hand to Stiles' arm and started asking if he was hurt.

"I'm fine, I just need out of the... the handcuffs. And Derek. Need Derek."

"Who's Derek?" the man asked. Stiles scrunched his face, still trying to breathe, and he realized some of the problem breathing was panic. And just his overall state of unwell the last few months, maybe. But panic was a thing burning at his chest in the empty hallway.

"Guide."

"Shit," said the Marine who had stopped to help. "Let's start at the infirmary then."

So Stiles followed the Marine further into the building, just because it was something to think about and something to do.

“Stiles!” Ellison yelled from the stairwell as there came a pounding of boots running down. Stiles started running toward the stairs.

“They had a van, it was parked behind your place, I couldn’t see the plates, Colonel told me to run,” Stiles reported in a rush, getting the information out as quick as he could before they lost more time. “I ran back. So, maybe, ten minutes?”

Ellison and Derek were the first to show up, Ronon on their heels and Rodney and Teyla filing out last. Derek caught up to Stiles first, hands on him and brushing mud off his face and arms to check for injury. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine,” Stiles repeated. “Sheppard started a fight and told me to run. I ran. I’m here. We gotta go find them-”

“Who?” Ellison asked, surprisingly calm, and Stiles was a little caught off guard. Rodney, in contrast, stood right next to the man and looked sick. “Did you find out who they were?”

Stiles shook his head. “Six guys in sloppy uniforms. They had these weird looking things in gun holsters, too. We didn’t have anything.”

“ _Weird_ , how?” Rodney asked.

"I can't- I don't know what they were, but Sheppard kept watching the guys who had them, not the guy with the gun in his face," said Stiles, a bit snappy from frustration. Ronon was putting a belt on that he had carried downstairs, and he finished the project by tugging a massive weapon from the holster he had just buckled to his thigh. The thing spun like a top even though it should have been too big not to get hung up and in the way. It charged with a soft humming _buzz_ and lit up in a few places. He pointed it near enough to Stiles that he could get a look at it, but he and Derek were in no danger.

"Weird like this?" Ronon asked. Stiles shook his head.

"No. I mean, well, maybe that size-" Stiles began. He kept pulling at his hands but it wasn’t like anybody exactly carried handcuff keys or a lockpick set on them every day. "I could show you but-"

"I sent somebody after Security. They'll have keys," said Jim. "The guys in uniforms. What kind of uniforms."

"Army surplus. Kinda like what Blair and Rodney do. It doesn't fit right, and my dad would have kicked somebody's ass if they ever showed up to work disrespectful like that."

"So like the guys from the bank," said Ellison. Stiles blinked at him.

"The Alphas? No way. Nothing- I mean, I couldn't have outrun them-"

Ellison shook his head. "No, Kincaid's men."

"I- I didn't see them really. Everybody was pinned down when I got back," said Stiles.

One of the Marines from the hallway earlier came in from another end of the hall. "Captain Ellison! Keys, sir."

Ellison met the Marine halfway and brought the keys back to let Stiles loose. He got one hand free and started trying to trace the shape of what he had seen on his leg. "The guns looked kinda like this," he said. He dragged a tight _N_ shape where the holster would have been. "But they didn't fit right in the holster, so they had them kinda... clipped in with carabiner clips."

"Zat guns? No, not possible," said Rodney. He started searching his pockets for a radio. "What the hell... I need to get Sam. And Caldwell."

"Can they pull them back up to the Daedalus?" Teyla asked. Rodney shook his head.

"Carson ripped Caldwell to bits for the last one. SGC would have to order it," said Rodney. He found his radio and turned it on to place it. "And there's no guarantee they'll be together, and maybe Blair doesn't have his radio. Crap, crap- _McKay to Daedalus_ -" He walked toward the doors, repeating himself, even adding in the _Lt. Colonel_ part as he tried to raise Caldwell. Ellison turned his attention to Stiles.

"You said this was at my place?" he asked. Stiles nodded.

"Blair wanted to walk, not be stuck inside, so we went there," said Stiles.

"Should Rodney be on his own just now?" Teyla asked, drawing attention back to the man shoving his way out the doors at the end of the hall.

"No-" The word was hardly out of Ellison’s mouth before Ronon was sprinting after McKay. Ellison followed, waving the others with him.

"Did they say what they wanted?" he asked as they walked.

"They said they were just the taxi, we had an appointment or something like that. John was mouthing off at them until he saw the weird guns. So that was all he got," said Stiles.

" _Appointment_ is promising," said Teyla. "Maybe they are safe at least until then. More time to get them aboard the Daedalus as before.”

"Whatever the appointment thing meant," said Derek.

"While McKay's working the Daedalus angle, we'll check my place," said Ellison. "See if they left anything."

Stiles bit his tongue on the apology burning at his brain. If they had stuck it out in the class, none of this would have happened. Even going to a place instead of just walking in circles had been his idea. But pointing that out wouldn't help anything now.

*~*~*


	44. Chapter 44

The plan had been to stop first at Ellison’s place, see if anything had been left behind, but by the time Ellison could borrow two vehicles from the campus and lead the way to his apartment, the building was _on fire_. 

"I saw them by the van- they're okay... right?" Stiles asked, panicked. Ahead of them, Jim parked the car blocking the road, and Derek followed suit. The vehicle was hardly stopped before Ronon was out of it and running. Rodney got out of the car, intent to yell at him, when he saw Ellison leading the Satedan to a side door, and the pair of them disappeared into the smoking building. That was the very last thing they needed, a Sentinel catching fire when his Guide was AWOL, and Rodney was distressed by it. But the Captain wasn't an idiot, and neither was Ronon. Rodney knew for a fact that Ronon had survived dumber things than running into a burning building, chasing after Sheppard. Rodney had. 

"Nobody else goes in!" Rodney barked out, just in case Stiles was thinking something similarly stupid. Teyla left the other car and came back to where Rodney stood. He felt useless, standing there, no cell phone to even call the fire department. He shouldn't have let them go in, but Rodney was not stupid enough to think he could have stopped either Ellison or Ronon. And he wanted to know, too, so at least it was _them_ being stupid enough to go in and not Rodney.

About the time the fire department showed up, Ronon was helping Ellison make it out. Derek and Rodney moved the cars to clear the road, and Stiles and Teyla started right in on batting smoke and fire off the two idiots who had run into the burning building.

"Ellison said he didn't hear them," Ronon reported as Jim sagged against the car and coughed. Heat still pushed out from the both of them and they had only been in there two minutes. Ronon coughed some but Ellison was the concern. "We checked the elevator, checked the apartment..."

"Smelled gasoline," Ellison said, choking on a cough. "Arson."

Other residents of the row of buildings had come out, all panicking about the proximity to their apartments or their businesses underneath. Derek had disappeared to grab help from the First Responders and Jim was swarmed by three EMTs a minute later. Rodney had to run interference because Ronon and Teyla weren't quite sure about what was happening with strangers in uniforms charging members of their team just then. 

"Hey, hey! Good guys! These are the good guys!" Rodney said, stupidly moving to put himself between Ronon and the EMT that had made the mistake of trying to talk to Ellison. "They'll make sure he's okay and then we'll take him to Carson."

Ronon accepted it and even let one of the medics check him over. He of course was fine, but the EMTs wanted the Sentinel on oxygen. And they didn't have his Guide to talk to, so Ellison sent them to Rodney. 

"If it can wait five minutes, we can get him to the infirmary-" Rodney said, trying to get the strangers off his back and Ellison’s. It wasn't like _medical emergencies_ could actually _wait_ , particularly not five whole minutes, but the medics were demanding time that neither Jim nor Rodney wanted to be wasting. "On the campus. It's _right_ there..."

"We'll drive you both there. He should stay on oxygen," said the medic. Annoyed and resigned, Rodney handed the car keys to Derek. He could either waste time arguing or they could get moving. "Pair up. Meet us back there. Stiles can drive, but you follow him, got me? I don't want him getting in trouble for this."

Ellison was being remarkably calm. Rodney felt like he was going to vibrate out of his skin, cramped in the back of the small ambulance, wanting to be anywhere else. He raised Carson on the radio to warn him that he had incoming.

When they finally let him out, Stiles was waiting, and Derek and Ronon and Teyla were walking over. Carson was still heading over from the labs building, white coat and all. Rodney, like the shameless traitor he was, pointed him out instantly to the medics.

"There's his doctor. He's got it from here," Rodney said, not caring at all that Carson would not be anywhere on any formal paperwork for Ellison’s care. And Carson dispelled any potential argument by walking right up to the back gate of the ambulance to investigate. They lost another three minutes to Beckett politely refusing their help seeing Ellison to the infirmary. They finally made it into the building unsupervised, only to find McMasters on a collision course. Rodney looked quickly to Ronon and Teyla.

"Watch the door," he told them. The last thing he needed was Ronon or Teyla getting in the Director's face. Free of the EMTs, Ellison was looking more like himself, with a quieter cough, and Carson was paying attention to him but not concerned enough to insist on the infirmary. 

"What’s going on? One of the students came to me saying there’s been a kidnapping, and then I can't find your _entire_ team," said McMasters, all snappy and annoyed. She could stand in line.

"Sandburg and Sheppard," said Ellison. "And whoever took them tried to burn down my apartment, too."

McMasters gave him a once over and then looked to McKay. "Why isn't he in the infirmary?"

"He doesn't need it, and we have things to do," replied Rodney. He pointed her attention to Carson. "The doctor's right there, you can ask him yourself. We're only in here because we need the armory. Then we'll be out looking."

"You should wait for the authorities," replied McMasters. "Your team isn't cleared for weapons outside of the range, I thought I explained that plainly enough after the last one. This is why you bring in the cops."

"It isn't a police matter," Rodney said. "It's classified."

"How is the disappearance of two people from this facility classified?"

"They weren't on campus. They were at the apartment. Which is now on fire. And I think _that_ sends a pretty clear message that we don't have a lot of time to play by the rules, here," returned Rodney, his tone matched up with hers in anger and then bumped over it a few notches. "So you're standing here, wasting our time, demanding answers, that we don't _currently have_ but that will very certainly be included in the eventual report. _Assuming_ we don't lose our men because we're stuck in red tape on our way out the damn door to find them!"

McMasters glared up at Rodney, arms crossed against the attitude. But she didn't rage at him for it. "How do you propose to find them?" she asked instead. "What do you expect to do when you find them?"

"Colonel Carter is sending a detail. We expect to _find them_ and bring them back here. How is this hard?"

"I _expect_ it's Kincaid," said Ellison, oddly running interference for Rodney's irritation with his boss. "Because of the problems the other day. And the fact that they knew where we live. Not many do."

McMasters considered that. Her attention went back to Rodney then. "And Colonel Carter is sending a detail to handle this?"

_Was that_ not _what he had just said_? Rodney bit his tongue and stood up straighter to glare at the wall rather than yell at the Director again. 

"Yes ma'am," he said. 

"Fine. Dr. McKay, your team is not certified as cleared for action. But you may accompany Colonel Carter’s team," said the Director. "Stay out of harm's way. Until Captain Sandburg’s return, you have _two_ compromised Sentinel in this situation. As Lt. Colonel, you are responsible for your team, so use your head."

That was their dismissal and there would be _no_ armory access. Rodney settled for the worst case scenario and turned to leave. There were other options. They would leave and figure it out without the Project’s interference. 

"Now what?" Derek asked as the group got back outside. 

"Two of us are armed," said Teyla.

"Daedalus can help us out with that if Sam didn't think of it first," said Rodney. He glanced over at Carson. "I wouldn't suppose you brought your gear this trip?"

"Of course not," the doctor replied. "I wasn't expecting there would be trouble _every day_."

"This trip is so not my fault," returned Rodney. Carson rolled his eyes and patted Rodney’s shoulder rather than tell him it was, at least in part, his fault. Rodney could have had an argument with the man's silence at that point, but instead he pointed everyone toward the helicopter pad where Sam had promised to meet them.

The Daedalus sent a Jumper, and Daniel Jackson, and General O’Neill came along as the pilot. That was certainly unexpected, but Rodney wasn’t going to argue. Caldwell was scanning the area from his ship, and O’Neill was running the same scan from the Jumper, closer in because of the increased population size of the Bay Area and the technological interference "up the wazoo" that was any major urban area. McKay had taken the copilot's seat and nobody argued. 

"We need _whatsit_ ordnance," McKay reported to the General. The man nodded vaguely.

"Daniel remembered that part. There's enough to be getting on with back there," he replied. Rodney glanced over at Daniel, in the jump seat behind the General, and nodded his thanks for that. He noticed Stiles crowding in the door between sections. 

"Hey- Stiles... ask the Jumper for-"

"Don't teach him how to fly this thing!" muttered O'Neill. Rodney ignored him and tried to refocus. 

"Stiles, just ask the Jumper for communications devices. _Portable_ communications devices," he said. 

"What? Out loud?" Stiles looked at him like he was crazy.

"No, think it. Imagine you're seeing it," said Rodney. Patience wasn't his strong suit. Neither was teaching.

"Great, now you got me thinking it too," said O’Neill. 

"Well, good, the more the merrier. I want three of them, so now you can get specific," said Rodney. "I don't even know if it will work, but I just can't fathom-"

From the jumpseat behind him, Ronon leaned forward and tapped Rodney on the shoulder.

"These?" he asked. Rodney turned his chair to see Ronon holding up three slate gray, crescent shaped devices. He pointed to the side compartment on the wall where he had found them. Stiles peeked forward to try to see them as Rodney carefully scooped them up. 

"You have got to be kidding me," Rodney said, staring in mild shock that it had worked.

*~*~*

John snapped out of the zone disoriented but mostly breathing. His lungs didn't hurt so something had changed. But that had definitely been a zone because his ears ached and the dials were still up way too high. It took him a minute to register that the pressing weight on his left arm was someone's hand, and almost that long for him to focus his vision back away from the far-away blur out the dark windows.

"Welcome back, man. Ten minutes... you don't mess around," said Blair, voice very quiet.

"Yeah, well, the van needs the power steering checked before it becomes a problem," said Sheppard, not checking his volume because he wanted to try to find what felt like _normal_ again. "So I got a bit distracted chasing that down."

"Oh, that's nice, doing basic automotive check ups for the guys with guns always gets brownie points," said Blair easily.

"I was thinking more about the fact that _I'm in it,_ and how it'd be nice if it stayed on the road for awhile, but I guess if they wanted to let me under the hood, I could give her a go," said John. He got a rough-feeling middle ground on the dials and got his focus back, so he looked to his arm. Blair had a careful hold of his left wrist where it rested on his leg, and they wore matching bracelets from a set of handcuffs. He was just guessing, but he didn't think Ellison would approve. John blinked and looked at his right hand, similarly locked to a tie-down loop mounted into the base of the tirewell he was scrunched up against.

"This day just keeps getting weirder," he muttered. Blair nodded.

"You zoned, but I couldn’t tell if it was on touch or hearing, or what. So, since you were crushing your arms and not responding, the nice gentleman with the handcuff keys found a compromise," said Blair. He offered a falsely cheerful smile. "Oh, by the way, they know about the whole Sentinel thing, and, you know, you weren't subtle. So... good luck, man."

John had to laugh as he rested his head back against the metal wall of the van to stare at the ceiling. Sandburg was scared, he could smell the fear like rotten fruit just starting to spoil under everything else in the van, and yet the guy was right there with the jokes. Less sass and anger than Rodney and his usual panic-triggered snark, but close enough to be familiar, and gallows humor was always welcome.

"Keep the dials down then, roger that," he said. Blair nodded.

"Way down," he confirmed. John nodded and curbed a sigh. He looked to the nice gentleman with the handcuff keys then. The guy was in his late twenties maybe, and did _not_ know how to work a uniform, but at least he wasn't ripping off the Air Force. 

"How far away is this meeting?" John asked. "We don't want to be late or anything."

"You two talk a lot," the kid complained.

"I just had a nap, I'm feeling chatty," Sheppard lied, rolling his eyes. Thankfully it was close enough to dark that the guy probably couldn't see him from so far away.

"We'll get there when we get there," said the front seat passenger, smacking the back of the driver's seat to get John's attention. The driver probably felt more threatened by it than John did, but he didn’t point that out. He just nodded.

"So... can we go back to talking too much or is this supposed to be a church van or something?" John asked.

"Shut up!" chorused all three of their captors. Blair ducked instinctively but he was calmer. John slumped back against the uncomfortable metal wall and closed his eyes for a minute. 

When he opened them, Blair was tapping a finger on the back of his hand and the van was driving slower, no longer bumping along on the freeway. John really had fallen asleep that time. And Blair had let him sleep, but now it was time to be awake. Waking up was a lot easier than snapping out of a zone out, and John checked that the dials were turned down before sitting up a little, drawing his legs up rather than wait for them to be kicked when the van stopped moving.

The van parked in a warehouse, because of course the guys in Army Surplus Chic believed in the utility of warehouses for offloading people they had kidnapped. 

"How long was I out for?" Sheppard asked Blair.

"Maybe forty minutes? I'd say we're about an hour from the Bay," Blair whispered back. John nodded, trying to pull up a mental map of where that put them. His gut said they had gone north, and he didn't know the north end of the Bay Area very well at all. He had avoided it back in his college days mostly, as his dad was pissed off at him for signing on with the Air Force and they didn't have a lot civil to say to each other for a time. It was one of those things that might have come in handy some twenty years later, but he couldn’t go back and tell his younger self to take better notes.

John and Blair were pulled out of the van and left cuffed together, Blair still hanging on to his wrist rather than let the bracelet tug him around by a broken wrist. Sheppard wasn't inclined to risk that changing so he behaved himself. They didn't have any clear exits mapped out yet, so running Sandburg through a half-dark warehouse full of dusty stacks of god-knew-what would be a good way to get themselves shot. And after an hour's drive out of the city, Sheppard was more than a little curious as to who wanted to meet them so badly.

They were left in what looked like an office, but there was a layer of dust on everything that said it wasn't used much as one. Annoying fluorescents buzzed on the ceiling and John hated everything about the place. When their babysitters from the van shoved them into the old couch along the wall, John had a coughing fit from the cloud that kicked up over them. He owed Rodney so many apologies for mocking his allergies. 

"You ever think maybe you get stuck paying for stuff you did in _this_ life, not the past ones?" John asked, looking for distraction. Blair nodded.

"Sure. Karma is a bitch, man," said Blair, helpfully clueless as to what John was on about but willing to go anyway.

"I don't know about that. _Bitch_ would imply Karma's the one getting screwed, and I really don't think that's the case here," replied John. Blair considered it before nodding.

"Valid point, brother," he said. 

"Would you two shut the hell up," asked their babysitter. It was accompanied by a threatening step closer. To which John tried to keep his mouth shut, but he was hit by a few violent sneezes.

A few minutes later, the office door opened. Sheppard wasn't very surprised to see Garrett Kincaid walk in, with his wannabe-Army fatigues done up sharp. His boots even shined. On the couch next to Sheppard, Blair, however, hit a new level of anxiety. John easily heard him drop into the careful, controlled breathing to try to calm himself.

Another man walked in behind Kincaid, older, frail looking. But he smelled acrid, like the Alpha werewolves had. Sheppard tensed as the two men stood shoulder to shoulder a few yards away, glaring down at them, cornered on a couch against the wall. Not an ideal place to be.

"I see Glass didn't break the hippie freak out of you, Nature Boy," said Kincaid. 

Blair seemed absolutely disinclined to reply, so Sheppard went in for the distraction. "Sorry, who are you? It seems somebody tore out this page in the appointment book, and we have no idea why we're meeting today..." 

"You’re Sheppard," said Kincaid.

"Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard, US Air Force," John corrected casually. 

"Oh, fancy title. Who gave it to you?" replied Kincaid.

"A career in the Air Force flying Apache in Afghanistan and keeping people alive," said Sheppard, a harder edge to his voice. "I climbed the ranks the old fashioned way, bootstraps and all. No shortcuts."

Kincaid seemed to catch the intended insult and Sheppard smiled back at the man's dark look. The old man with the werewolf smell took advantage of Kincaid's sudden mood shift to interrupt.

"Then why would you be at all interested in our Stiles? What part of climbing the ranks does the orphaned son of a small county sheriff play?" asked the creaky old stranger. His chest rattled strangely, a cough threatening and being ignored.

"The kid wants to join the AirForce and I've got a place on my team for his skill set. Not sure why this is a hard thing for you folks to understand," said Sheppard. _How the hell did this guy know about Stiles?_ Beside him, Blair had gone back to trying not to be caught breathing.

"It's hard for me to understand why you would want a murderer on your team," the man replied. "That is Derek Hale's skill set, as you call it, and yet you're letting him stay, with a teenager, on your team."

Sheppard scoffed at that. "Hale's no murderer."

"He killed my only daughter, my Kate, very nearly killed my granddaughter Allison's dear mother. He is a monster, and monsters do as they will. _That one_ kills," the man rasped. Sheppard recognized the names.

"You’re Gerard. _Gerard_ Argent," said Sheppard. Well, this whole experience was shaping up nice and cozy _._ A domestic terrorist and a guy who hunted humans for sport were buddies. And tracking John's team. That definitely sounded like his luck lately. The old man smiled and the cough finally escaped. 

"Oh, that's nice. All friends here," said Blair quietly, his eyes on the floor.

"That's right," replied Kincaid, brightening as he moved to crouch just off the edge of the couch to make Blair look at him. "We do go back, don't we, Nature Boy? Too bad Ellison missed the invite. So how long can we keep you here before he starts getting violent again? Argent lost two men to him last week. How long until we drive that body count up?"

Technically one of them was Sheppard's shot, but it didn't seem wise to point that out just then. Blair shook his head.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, man. That's not how this stuff works, anyway-"

"Oh, you didn’t hear about the aftermath from your friends' assisted kidnapping of young Mr. Stilinski?" Gerard asked. Sheppard watched the old man warily, creeped out by the blackened color to his teeth and the handkerchief he had used to block the cough.

"We didn't _kidnap_ anybody," said Sheppard. Blair looked over at him sharply.

" _Kidnapping_ is the one you're worried about right now?" Blair asked.

"They were going to shoot you and McKay. The _other one_ was _defensive fire_ ," Sheppard told him, quiet.

"You'll excuse me if your story falls a little flat," replied Gerard. "As you then told my men that you were acting on behalf of the Sunrise Patriots, in defense of someone in their care."

Attention on the sick werewolf a few feet away, Sheppard could feel Blair glaring at him beside him. He didn't have an easy explanation for that one. "Well... he _obviously_ didn't know you were _chummy_ at the time..."

"Oh my god. I'll kill him," Blair muttered under his breath. Kincaid reached over to pat Blair's knee with false sympathy. 

"You might," he agreed, because _that_ wasn't creepy at all. Sheppard leaned forward to the edge of the couch, just to remind the man that he was still there and attached. Kincaid looked over at him, stood up to glare down at him. "So then, Colonel Sheppard. If Stilinski is in the care of the Sunrise Patriots, where's my boy? I should probably be getting him back where he belongs. Away from the murderers who took him from his foster family."

Sheppard didn't have anything to say to that. He shrugged. "I'm _here_. How would I know?"

Kincaid tsked at him and made to grab Sandburg off the couch, but Sheppard stood up and stepped into the man’s space instead. He was a full head taller than Kincaid and looked down at him easily as Blair scrambled back up onto the couch. 

"Back off," Sheppard said. Kincaid looked up at him, head tilted.

"You’re one of them," he said. "Sentinel, like Ellison. One of Glass’ experiments."

"I'm the guy with a piece of paper that makes me Stiles' guardian, signed by his father," said Sheppard rather than deal with the Sentinel questions. "So the kid isn't your problem. Either of you."

"His father died six months ago," said Gerard, lying like a bad rug. Sheppard glanced over at him but kept most of his attention reserved for the walking Napoleon complex standing in front of him. 

"Considering I met the guy three days ago, you'd be hard-pressed to prove that," he replied. "And, as I understand it, you and yours _owe_ me and mine for taking care of your Alpha problem. So if all you wanted from Stiles was to make the Alphas go away, the good news is he already did it."

"My granddaughter wants her friend away from the monster who murdered her beloved aunt," said Gerard, clinging to a stupid story to try to make himself some kind of hero.

"How about I just get him away from Beacon Hills, so nobody there has to worry about him anymore. They can exchange emails. In fact, I _just_ had this conversation with your granddaughter," replied Sheppard. 

Gerard smiled at him. "Yes. She told me."

"Then why are we having it again?" Sheppard figured he already knew the answer, but at this point the best he could do was stall for an opportunity. The two men behind their evening adventure were delusional at best, psycho at worst.

"Your answer was unacceptable."

"Figured," said Sheppard, nodding. They were in a warehouse, with nothing but hostiles between them and any door, and somewhere an hour away from backup. The best he and Blair had was a couch to stand on to get away from an attack, and even that had their backs to a cinder block wall. Not a lot of options to work with. Sheppard looked between the two men apparently in charge of the guys with the guns before looking down at Kincaid. 

"My team's non-negotiable. We can agree to disagree for now, but you're going to need to back up a few steps," he said.

"You need to sit down and shut up, _Colonel_ ," replied Kincaid. John shrugged and sat on the front edge of the couch, dragging Blair's hand down enough that the Guide caught the hint and sat on the top edge of the back of the couch, right behind Sheppard with knees crammed against his shoulders. He at least wasn’t going anywhere without John getting involved.

If they wanted to be stubborn pains in the ass, Sheppard could play that. But no part of him wanted to throw the first punch because he knew it would hurt. Not when he wasn’t sure how long he could last once the fight started. Diplomacy was the tactic of choice for the moment.

“Look, the kid is the property of the US government at this point, Kincaid. Just like the Colonel here, and me,” Blair began, very careful. “There’s literally nothing you or the Argents can do about that. They’re going to scoop him up and have him gone by now.”

“Especially after that stunt this afternoon,” said Sheppard, not thinking. “This is going to be two-and-two is four and my team will ghost him.”

“What- this _afternoon_?” asked Blair, in what had to be his best imitation of Rodney McKay. “What happened this afternoon?”

John sat up and straightened his shoulders, caught out. “ _Allison_ Argent and Scott showed up to try to get Stiles to leave. We, uh, didn’t solve it as well as we thought we did.”

“I can’t believe this.” Blair reached forward with a move he learned from Ellison, smacking Sheppard just behind his ear. He flinched but didn’t retaliate as Blair carried on openly complaining.

“You don’t even have to worry about Ellison at this point, I’m gonna kill him when I see him for this. _One_ goddamn rule. Don’t leave the Guide in the dark on shit that’s gonna come back around to bite them in the ass,” Blair said. “And that’s apparently the goddamned theme of the day today, isn’t it?”

Even Kincaid backed off from the rant, apparently somehow surprised that Sandburg still had a _loud_ voice under the quiet front he had put up so far. Sheppard somehow refrained from looking back at Blair, trying to figure out if the Guide had actually snapped or if he was making a play. Everything John was getting off the man was anger now, compared to the fear from a minute earlier. 

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Kincaid, his brief amusement at the scene quickly faded. 

"Oh, fuck off, Kincaid," returned Blair. A heartbeat later there was a Glock in play and aimed very clearly at John's head. It would be impossible to miss at that range and Sheppard didn’t want to bet on Kincaid’s marksmanship skills. He looked up carefully at the man on the other end of the weapon. Kincaid split his attention between Sheppard and Sandburg, and behind him, John could tell Blair had stopped breathing.

"Open your mouth again and you're handcuffed to a dead man, Sandburg. How well do you think that's gonna go for you?" Kincaid asked. 

Sandburg didn't answer. Sheppard didn't move, tracking Kincaid with his eyes and Blair and the other two in the room with his hearing. 

"That's better," said Kincaid. But the gun stayed aimed at John, mere inches from his face. 

Blair's knee nudged at John's back and it felt like more of a signal than an accident. Sheppard had half been expecting it and he moved. One hand shot up to catch the gun and the other out to break Kincaid's elbow as Sheppard twisted the gun and the arm that was attached to it. At the same time, he stood, and Blair mirrored him to keep the handcuffs from interfering. The gun was handed off to Blair as Sheppard used his hold on Kincaid's broken arm to send the man to his knees. 

"Keys," Sheppard ordered, looking to the gobsmacked fake Sergeant standing by the door with his Beretta still tucked in the holster under his arm. Blair alternated between pointing the weapon at Kincaid and the two still by the door. When there was no immediate response, John kicked the man's knees a little further apart and made it harder for him to balance, drawing a reluctant shout from the terrorist that sounded a lot like " _Do it_!" and Sheppard smiled as the minion scrambled to find the keys.

Blair got the keys handed to him politely and let himself loose. Then he handed John the gun and unlocked the cuff from his wrist as Sheppard kept the other two threats covered. Once he was loose, Sheppard shifted back a step and shoved Kincaid face down to the office floor, stepping on the back of his thigh as he kept the broken arm twisted up so Sandburg could handcuff Kincaid's wrists behind his back. 

It all took less than thirty seconds, and the entire time, Gerard Argent stared at Sheppard with an unnatural, tar-tinted smile. John kept the gun trained between Argent and Kincaid's minion. With the cinder block construction of the old warehouse, Sheppard and Sandburg were in a somewhat defensible position in the office, assuming the gun had a full magazine, and as long as they didn't want to actually leave the building. Kincaid still lay at his feet, slowly recovering from the shock of the broken arm and starting to stir. 

"Tell me, Colonel Sheppard, what did you accomplish here?" Argent asked, smug. "We stand between you and the door, and we have more than that between the door and the street. And you have nowhere you could possibly go from there that we wouldn't find you first." 

"That's one of those details I was gonna figure out later," said Sheppard, shrugging it off to play off the honesty of the admission. He looked at the kid in the uniform. " _You_ put your weapons on the desk. Easy and careful."

The kid looked to Kincaid and John leaned on the leg under his boot, making the terrorist more angry but still in pain, so Sheppard won the standoff. The minion in uniform started putting guns and knives on the desk, and Blair moved quickly to collect the weapons they could use.

"This does you no good. One word of alarm and we have ten men in here," said Gerard.

"And I don't hear anybody saying anything," replied Sheppard. "You could be bluffing. We'll take our chances."

Gerard moved toward the desk and Sheppard adjusted his aim. "I'm fifty-fifty on if this will kill you, but it _will_ hurt. Give me an excuse," he warned. Gerard stopped, standing more directly in front of the door. Blair stepped clear of the other two and handed the Beretta over to John. 

Suddenly Kincaid let out a loud scream, not a yell, but the grown man trying to raise hell on Sentinel senses with the highest pitch genetics would let him get to. Sheppard backed up a step, not surprised as much as unprepared for the intensity of the tactic. Blair stepped forward and kicked the man across the jaw with the bottom of his boot to shut him up.

Whatever chance they might have had to sneak out was definitely gone now. It actually made Sheppard feel a little better. He adjusted his aim and fired two shots at Gerard Argent, watching them strike his chest, ribs, near enough to his heart to slow him down. The man went wide eyed, then narrowed them as the anger settled in to drive the adrenaline. The disturbing thing was the black blood seeping out of the wounds. _That_ wasn't normal. 

"Crap," Sheppard muttered, catching his arm out over Blair to get him behind him. Gerard advanced on them, still looking frail and yet somehow now demonic as the old man started to shift into a werewolf. The kid in the uniform snuck from the room in a hurry, crossing himself as he stumbled back. There was a shout as he ran into something unyielding in the only half-lit warehouse beyond the office.

That caught John’s attention, and he managed a smile as he put another bullet in the Argent werewolf. A moment later two shadows crept through the door a few feet behind Gerard as the man struggled to shift and heal his way around bullet wounds. Even Sandburg easily recognized Derek Hale and Daniel Jackson as the pair rushed Gerard, claws out. Daniel sported sideburns and fangs, too, so the guy had been practicing. Gerard spun on the attack, only to step right into the claws, impaling himself with just a little help from the other two. The old man gurgled as he tried to shout at Derek and the two _good guy_ werewolves drew back to let him slump to the ground.

Beyond them, Sheppard saw more movement by the door and raised the gun, only to see Jack O'Neill closing the office door. He had a Life Signs Detector in one hand and a gun in the other. He and his own genetic advantage had apparently been the werewolves' guide through the maze of the warehouse unnoticed. 

"You shoot me, I'm taking your team," Jack warned, and Sheppard lowered the gun quickly. 

"Yessir. Sorry, sir," John replied. Jack locked the office door and John swore under his breath. Apparently the front door wasn't their way out. This was gonna hurt. He steered Blair toward the others. Jack had a radio.

"Daedalus, five for transport," O’Neill said. He looked to Sheppard and clapped him on the shoulder as he stepped close. "Sorry."

John dropped the stolen guns and kicked them toward the two passed out bodies in the middle of the room. Kincaid would be angry but he would wake up. Argent was another matter, and Sheppard wasn't going to worry about it. The man could bleed out black goo and the world would be better for it.

"Daedalus sending someone for those two?" John asked.

"Priorities first, Sheppard," said O’Neill. The Daedalus got the lock on the team then and the room lit up a little more obnoxiously bright. Blair caught John’s wrist and told him to dial everything down, just before they were suddenly crowded inside the back of a Jumper. John tried to turn the dials down and waited for the pain to kick in. 

"Wait... the Jumper?" he asked. Blair pushed at him to get him to move and John realized he couldn't feel it, let alone move where he was told. 

"Jumper," he heard Rodney’s voice and saw his friend helping catch him as he fell. The two Guides managed to get him to the bench on their own. Rodney took hold of his arms and touched their foreheads together. 

"See you in a few hours," John muttered. The sharp rush of electricity burned all over and John passed out.

*~*~*


	45. Chapter 45

When the Jumper landed, Ronon scooped John up without assistance as easily as he would have Teyla and headed out the back gate. O'Neill had landed the cloaked Jumper in a darker corner of the parking lot, with the gate opening toward the trees to minimize exposure to snoops. Sentinel in the dorms could have heard the engines, but they wouldn't have seen more than the glow of the lights reflecting as people left. Carson and Carter had stayed behind and they showed up promptly with a litter but Ronon ignored them.

"I've got him," he said. Rodney didn't have any complaints and just kept up, following Ronon toward the dorm. Carson spluttered as Rodney held the door open and Ronon disappeared inside.

"The infirmary, lads... I need to make sure-"

"You can look him over in his room," said Ronon. Rodney was in full agreement of avoiding the infirmary and hurried after Ronon. He charged up the stairs ahead of them to get the door open and the lights on. Carson would do what he needed to in order to change locations with his patient, and John would be kept from the berations of the Director whenever the witch decided she wanted to poke her nose in on him, thanks to a locking door. Rodney preferred it this way.

He didn't see any new injuries on the list, but Stiles had said John had started a fight to get him a clear window to run, so as Ronon set the man down, Rodney ordered his help in keeping the unconscious body upright enough to peel out of the long sleeve shirt. There were bruises on his left wrist now, and the brace was missing, but nothing else seemed new. John's whole left side was still a huge spreading bruise from getting rammed like a train by a wild werewolf alpha, his right side just a few patches of color from the fight with Daniel, and Ronon grunted his disapproval. But they got him down and as comfortable as possible. Then Rodney set to work on his boots, muttering a thank you to Ronon. The Satedan patted his shoulder and dropped back to lean on the desk. Apparently they would have an in-room guard for the time being. He crossed his arms and surveyed the room.

"Someone cleaned up," he observed. Rodney cast a glare at him over his shoulder before deciding to ignore him.

"Rodney?" Teyla asked from the doorway. Rodney tossed the last boot at the bathroom with the other. Then he looked at her.

"It's going to be a few hours, probably," said Rodney. "Ellison was perfectly healthy and the transport beam had him down for what, six hours? Stiles was eight?"

By then, Stiles and Derek stood behind her in the door and Derek nodded to confirm it.

"What should we tell the Director?" Teyla asked. Rodney pointed at her and then Ronon.

"You two tell her nothing. Stay away from that crazy female," he said. Teyla frowned and Ronon's eyebrow twisted up.

"Crazy? She seemed perfectly normal, really. She would often stop by to check on Ronon and I this week, even granted us access to the library," said Teyla, confused. Rodney visibly sagged. _That_ figured. Rodney couldn't figure out how to explain it to them and didn't want to try.

"Fine. Just let Blair talk to her about this stuff. Not you guys," he said. He peeked out the window toward the parking lot, looking for Carson, before rolling the desk chair over to sit by John. Ronon wasn't put off by it.

"Why?" he pressed

"She doesn't like Sentinel," said Derek.

"She and John went a round a few times," Rodney added, shaking his head. Teyla frowned and nodded.

"Perhaps then, Ronon or I _should_ handle her," she offered.

"Define _handle_ ," replied Rodney, considering it. He shook his head and derailed the thought. "No, just let Blair do it. She's his boss."

Carson showed up then, with a big bag of different gadgets and Sam Carter sneaking in behind him with more. Rodney gawked.

"The idea was to get him _away_ from this stuff," he said, complaining.

"Aye, but the idea is not exactly a sound one, Rodney. He should still be monitored," said Carson.

"Well, yeah, that's what _we_ were going to do," said Rodney. Carson looked up at him enough to glare before returning his attention to figuring out how to plug in machines. Then he kicked Rodney out of his chair to steal it for himself.

A few minutes later, John was tucked in under a blanket and had silent monitors in place that then plugged in to Carson's computer. Everything neatly how the voodoo doctor ordered it, and Rodney sat on the desk next to Ronon. Teyla and the others lurked in the big hallway between rooms, alternating between sitting in chairs and standing in the door as everyone waited for Carson's official notice that John was in the clear.

The ventilator stayed in the bag. The IVs stayed in the bag. Rodney took that as a good sign.

"Brain activity is low, but stronger than it was on the Daedalus, though whether that's because of the ship or because of the retrovirus removal is anybody's guess, as I certainly don't want to be experimental with this, more than necessary," said Carson finally.

"We don't have _that_ much Ancient technology integrated with the ship," said Sam, arms crossed and frowning from the doorway. "I don't understand what it is that's causing that difference."

"We have it hooked in with the central operations, along with the Asgard systems," said Rodney. "A lot of this stuff is proximity based... Like the chair. The pads on the armrests monitor brain activity as well as touch-sensored physiological commands. The same way a Sentinel interprets physiological responses that are otherwise off the spectrum for you or I. So if they are too close to it, they tap into it and... stay there. John wrote the report that night that way. He was... in the onboard systems, hiding from this."

Carson nodded and sighed. "So we'll see how this goes. Without the ship..."

"I really don't like _this_ ," said Sam.

"This is just a system-restore, isn't it?" said Rodney, waving toward John. "The transporter overloads his sensory system and it shuts him down, that's all. It's recovery and reboot. Once he's more stable, it might even stop entirely. We have no way of knowing until he does it more often."

Dr. Beckett puffed himself up. "Which he will _not-_ "

"Just try to stop him, Carson. Just try," replied Rodney, crossing his arms. It wasn't a challenge to his friend, just a simple statement of fact. "You won't keep him from the 'gate."

That was met with silence from the two who had the actual authority to further ground the unconscious pilot.

"We go with _Sheppard_ ," said Ronon. He nodded toward Teyla where she stood beside him in the doorway. "I don't care if we gotta camp for a few hours on the other side."

"And the process for the wormhole doesn't hit him the same anyway," added Rodney. "It will balance out once he gets his senses right, I'm sure of it."

"Now who's subscribed to voodoo?" Carson asked, frowning. Rodney stilled, shrinking slightly before he shrugged.

"We'll see what he says on the other side of it," said Sam, though she was still disapproving of it, based on the frown that hadn’t faded since she had followed Carson into the room. "I'll go report to the General. See how Blair is holding up."

Rodney realized he wanted to know the answer to that himself. He didn't really want to leave to find out, however. Rodney worked nervously at his lower lip before he jumped down from the desk. "I'll go with you."

"Shouldn't you stay-"

"I don't know what happened while he was gone," said Rodney. "And I should. And I want to know it won't happen again if we're here. Something may have to be changed, planned for differently. This building is _far_ from secure."

"I'm sure we can mention that to the Director-"

"I would prefer to be informed of the facts of a situation relating to my Sentinel before asking that woman's opinion on it," replied Rodney. Sam didn't argue with that and reached back into the room to usher Rodney out into the hall.

"We'll be back," Sam said to Carson.

They ended up back at the main building again, a place Rodney was well beyond tired of. He preferred the lab or the dorm. He really preferred home, but he was still nearly a month away from that. So he followed Sam to the Director's office, where they found General O’Neill and Daniel Jackson in conversation with Ellison and Blair, and McMasters standing not far away.

"Sir, Dr. McKay asked to be briefed on the situation, now that Colonel Sheppard is stable," said Sam. That sounded like the more official military way to phrase it so Rodney stored it away and tried to remember the difference in appropriate audiences. General O’Neill waved them over to find a place to sit or stand, whichever they preferred. Rodney promptly found a chair, far from the Director.

“He’s stable... what’s that mean, in the current sense?” O’Neill asked.

“In a coma, but Dr. Beckett is satisfied that there is more brain activity than the last time Colonel Sheppard... had this problem,” said Sam, carefully considering the presence of Director McMasters. “He’ll be monitoring him, but at this time, life support measures weren’t necessary and he’ll be staying with his team.”

“Does Dr. Beckett know what caused the Sentinel to drop into a coma?” McMasters asked. She sounded concerned, but Rodney wasn’t sure how to read her after the way she had treated him so far. “It is slightly concerning that he has seen action twice in a week and both times come back in a coma. I need to know it isn’t a risk to the other Sentinel on this campus-”

“As it was the last time this happened, the nature of Colonel Sheppard’s injuries are classified at this time, Director. When it becomes a concern for your teams, I’ll be certain to let you know, but as of now, this is contained to a need-to-know,” said O’Neill. And that made Rodney feel a little better. Though he was glad that Blair would have to write the SPR file report on it.

“I just need to know what happened to him _before_ that,” said Rodney. “You know, make sure there’s not _more_ than that.”

“We’re fine,” said Blair, smiling a little as Rodney tried to figure out how to talk in awkward classified-code. He wasn’t used to it; everyone on Atlantis knew about Atlantis, and there wasn’t much more _top secret_ to worry about than that. Blair shrugged and shook his head.

“Well, I _think_ anyway. He got into it once, at the van when they picked us up. Just small scuffles. They weren’t there to rough us up, they were just the delivery guys,” said Blair. “They wanted to take Stiles. It was Gerard Argent, the guy who worked Stiles over after his dad died? And, well, yeah, and Kincaid. So it was the Sunrise Patriots behind it, they’re just somehow aligned with the Argents.”

“The Argents are gun dealers, Chief. Legitimate sales, supposedly,” said Ellison. “They have contracts with police departments up and down the coast from what Sheppard and Carter dug up before we went up there. That was why we needed the weapons on hand before talking to them.”

Rodney looked to O’Neill, his frown a straight line. “And the Sunrise Patriots, at least, have connections to the Trust. Colonel Caldwell mentioned it. From his, uh, prior experiences.”

“Which explains the experimental tech Stiles reported, yes,” said O’Neill, nodding.

“Did you hear back yet? Please tell me Caldwell’s team picked them up,” Blair said. O’Neill winced and nodded.

“Half of the objective was managed anway. When they got there, Argent was already gone,” said the General. “Kincaid’s in custody at Beale. Warehouse was locked down for my team to take a look at.”

“That was fast,” said Director McMasters, blinking at the General in surprise. Jack offered a vague smile.

“Colonel Caldwell wasn’t messing around. The man kidnapped two members of Homeworld Security and was in possession of experimental, classified technology that could have certainly done some damage,” said O’Neill.

“Argent’s a problem,” said Ellison. “That’s twice in _one day_ they’ve tried to get Stiles.”

“What the hell do they want?” asked the Director. “He’s just a _kid_.”

“The Argents were Stiles’ foster family for a couple of months or something. They think Derek’s a bad influence and will hurt him, from what I could tell,” said Blair. He leaned on the armrest of his chair and rubbed at his forehead like he had a headache, shaking his head. “The guy was creepy. I get why Stiles is afraid of him enough to live in the woods for a week rather than go home to that whole family. I’m going to have nightmares for a freakin’ week and I was around him for less than a half hour.”

“There’s no security on the dorm building. A _child_ could get into the lobby,” Rodney pointed out. “And these people burned Ellison and Sandburg’s apartment. They know where Stiles is staying. We can’t stay here.”

Jack looked to the Director then, tapping the sunglasses in his hand distractedly on the armrest of his chair.

“Director, I know we agreed to a week. But under the circumstances, I don’t think it’s a wise arrangement, for your campus or my team,” said O’Neill. “I would like to request the remainder of training be turned over to Captains Ellison and Sandburg so I can get them and the rest of the team to safer territory.”

"Given that I can’t provide secure accommodation on this side of the country, I don't see we have many other options," said McMasters. "While I'm sympathetic to Colonel McKay's situation, I still believe Colonel Sheppard is not ready for command, and I am worried that the unit has already bonded as they have. It throws Captain Sandburg’s usual objectivity out the window, and I think puts the team in a different risk category altogether. I would still prefer they work with the Project. And I must ask again that you reconsider allowing me to send a non-Sentinel representative to help keep the unit on track as the new Sentinel stabilize."

"I don't think that's necessary," said Rodney quickly. "We'll have three weeks on the- trip home. We'll get the same training on the road as we can here."

"Certainly, if Captain Sandburg can manage it. I've known him two years now, however, and this is the worst turn-around his team has ever shown," said McMasters.

Blair ground his jaw. "There has obviously been extenuating circumstances... this has not been a great week, Jo... for any of us."

"And you expect three weeks of travel to be any better?" the Director replied.

" _Yes_! There won't be anyone running around trying to kill us, for starters," Sandburg blurted out. "That _glaring_ detail should take care of _a lot_ of our problems."

The woman moved to sit down behind her desk rather than stand at the front of it.

"Director, we got off to a rocky beginning, sure. But that's because my team didn't have vital information from the start, not to mention, John was still... dealing with a _bug_ from a month before any of this started. He was sick when he got here. Stiles was sick when he got here. And they’re _not_ now," said Rodney.

"He's in a _coma_ , Dr. McKay," replied McMasters reasonably.

" _Yes_ , but we know _why_ , and we expect he will recover soon," said Rodney. "A week of rest and he'll be better. The team can go back to training. With nobody sick, and nobody trying to kill anybody."

"I'm _not_ promising there won't be _violence_ if my team doesn't start _listening_ to me, but there will be no terroristic attempts on anyone's life," said Blair. It was accompanied by a glare at Jim, but the Sentinel stared back, oblivious to it in a way that Rodney felt he understood completely.

"Fine," said McMasters after a moment to process. She looked back up and directly at Blair. "But while you're in communications range, I want reports on progress. _Daily_."

"Yes ma'am," said Blair quickly.

Director McMasters dropped her hands on the desk, arms folded in front of her. "I guess you two have packing to do," she said.

"Yes ma'am," Blair replied.

"Leave me instructions on what to do with your apartment. What survived of your things, anyway. I'll have it done when the investigation is complete," McMasters said.

"Yes ma'am," Blair said again. Rodney remembered again why he hadn’t ever wanted to join the military. Tedium and pomp.

"Go pack," said General O’Neill. "As long as packing doesn't require leaving campus. Do not do that. You go _no_ further than the other building."

Ellison and Sandburg stood up from the couch and headed for the door, and Daniel followed quickly after them. Rodney looked uncertainly from Sam to O'Neill, not sure what the plans to leave immediately would mean for John in his current state. Before he could ask, Director McMasters was looking back to the General.

"I'm not gonna get that team back, General," she said. "They have been absolutely invaluable to this program. They can't be replaced. And they are _gone_."

"None of that, now... It's just a five year contract, Director," said O’Neill.

"They signed on with a unit. Already. After a _week_." McMasters waved toward Rodney and he instantly wished he had left with the others. "All the teams they've trained, there has never been this. They've never done this."

"Done what? Get shot at a few times?" O’Neill asked, offering up a shrug. "They've got either bad luck or good luck, I haven't figured that one out yet."

"That's part of it, I'm sure. But those two came back different that first day. This isn’t teaching for them this time. They hooked into the tribe. They'll _follow_ orders before they give them, and that's my concern," said McMasters. She shook her head. Rodney straightened in his chair and looked over at the woman.

"You’re consistently underestimating my team. And I don't appreciate it," he informed her, mustering some courage under the circumstances. "If you're going to keep coming up with reasons we're unfit, at least cite empirical evidence rather than vague complaints."

"Oh, I could. I assure you," replied the Director. "But at this juncture there's little point. Colonel Sheppard will get his way. Training ends. Your team is unprepared and out in the world anyway. And you have already experienced that it will be you who suffers for it. That's not a vague complaint, simply fact."

"Seems then that the team will have good incentive to iron this stuff out before they get where they're going," said General O’Neill. He looked over at Rodney. "Speaking of, Dr. McKay. If you wouldn't mind going to inform the rest of your team that they'll be leaving, oh, say, soonish?"

"What about John?" Rodney asked, belatedly and awkwardly tacking on a _sir_ at the end. Sam smiled at him for it.

"You, Dr. Beckett, and Dex will stay here until Sheppard is up and around. The other two Sentinel teams leave with me," said the General. Rodney nodded and stood. "And if you happen to see Sandburg et al, remind them not to dawdle. I am _double parked_ , as it were."

Rodney remembered the jumper they had left in the parking lot an hour earlier. "Right. Sir. Yes. I'll pass that along."

And then Rodney left the room, escaping before he could get dragged back in on any of the plans and messy details he had no interest in.

*~*~*

The news that they would be leaving was welcome. Stiles wanted to be done with the training. He was more of a hands-on application kind of student, and another few days of being talked down to and doing busywork that Derek would have to take notes on was just going to make him stir-crazy.

And that was his attention span _before_ the day's kidnapping attempt. Post-running through the small coastal preserve in handcuffs, Stiles was too on-edge. He had to be _doing something_.

What stopped Stiles in his tracks was Rodney telling them that Gerard Argent had been behind it. That Blair had seen Gerard, personally, enough to expect nightmares. The Argents were why Stiles had almost lost his shot at being around people that _didn't_ want to kill him, at having friends and a home again.

He still could lose that shot, if Sheppard woke up as some kind of vegetable. A coma was still a coma. A system overload could still fry the system. Carson was worried. And John had been under for nearly two hours. Last time, he had been sick, and unconscious for longer than that.

"I'll make sure everything is packed," Derek said, standing from the couch beside Stiles. Stiles nodded absently. Then he stood, too.

"I need my computer," he decided. "This place has internet, right?"

And five minutes later, Stiles was back on the couch, his laptop computer in his lap and online. Everything had been assembled in different folders on his desktop, and that was confusing. One of the folders said " _McKay_ " on it, though, so Stiles excused it, assuming they had gotten the Bestiary for Daniel somehow.

Stiles just needed his email. He sat down and wrote out an email to his former friends.

\---

From: @MCStilesCo  
To: @ScootMcC, @allisonally, @jackasswhit, @chefboydRD, @issackz  
BCC: @LydiaMars, @mommel, @daddio  
Subj: LEAVE. ME. ALONE.

WHAT THE HELL, YOU GUYS.

So my CO is sitting in a coma now. Thanks for that.

First Scott thought it was okay to kill my dad. Im not ok with that, scotty. Ever. Save him from the Alphas & maybe we'll talk again some fuckin day. Subject done.

But here's the icing on this masisve mitherfucking cake of WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT. Allison jst had fukin Gerard try to kill the guys who I ASKED FOR HELP.

My CO is in a COMA. I've known the guy a week an he's had to save my life twice from your freaking hunters and terrorisys. Fleshy humans DIE, REMEMBER?

STOP.

Do I gotta spell this out in Morse code or something to get u freaks to LEAVE ME ALONE

It's MY gd damned LIFE! Stop tryig to get me killed!!1!1!1!!!!!

Srsly. Fuck off.

I am gtting on a fucknig rocket & launching myself into anohter GALAXY to get away from you.

JUST STOP.

Stles

PS: Stop tryng to hack Lydia for info. She deosn't know anything anymore either. I'm not at hte address u stole from her anymore. I mean it. Fuck off.

Pss: Lydia. Watch you back. These fuckers are crazy.

\---

He attached a picture, taken with the camera on his laptop, of him flipping off everyone the email was aimed at. He thought about adding in another one of him kissing Derek, just to _really_ piss off Allison and Scott, but he didn't figure Derek would go for it. And the point was to get them to back off, not bait the hook.

Stiles didn't even read it over. He was pissed off. He sent it. He turned the computer off and shoved it back in his backpack. Then he went to sit in John's room with Rodney and Carson. Ronon had given up on his watch, so Stiles took up half the desktop to sit back against the wall.

"He'll be fine," Rodney told him, quiet.

"Yeah, maybe. Comas still do damage. And with the way everything else goes with this stuff so far, maybe having us around helps," said Stiles. "If we can give you headaches, maybe we can get him to wake up."

"I'm sure that's not how this works," replied Rodney. But he was still thinking about it anyway.

Ronon showed up a few minutes later. "This planet is stupid," he announced instead of saying hello, because Ronon wasn't that boring. Across the room, Carson blinked at him from the chair near Sheppard.

"What's this about?" he asked.

"I need money. Somebody's gotta pay this guy Thad or he won't do it. Also, this planet has stupid names," Ronon replied. "He's downstairs. Somebody come pay him."

"Uh... Ronon... pay him for what, exactly?" Carson and Rodney seemed mighty uncomfortable with it all suddenly and Stiles stared in open-mouthed shock.

"Tell me you didn't go find a hooker," he blurted. "Like, seriously, dude, Teyla-"

Ronon stared back at him, confused and judging Stiles as an idiot with all the expertise of a Hale. "No. The tattoo guy."

"Oh thank god," muttered Carson. Stiles broke out with a laugh and clapped a hand over his mouth. Carson looked to Rodney, a relieved sort of smile on his face. "This is on you, Colonel McKay. Your team."

Rodney glared at the abandonment before he started digging through his pants pockets for a wallet. Once it was found, he started to give it to Ronon but then thought better of it.

"Fine," he grumbled. He stood up from the desk then. He shook a finger at Stiles. "Stay. And- where's Derek? Hale!" Rodney stepped out of the room to look for Derek. Stiles peeked out to see him stick his head in the open door of their room long enough to order Derek to babysit Stiles and Sheppard. Then he pounded down the stairs after Ronon, still complaining about Ronon trying to spend other people's money.

Derek appeared a moment later, dumping their duffel bags outside their door. Then he showed up and shoved Stiles over to make him share the desk. There was quiet for a moment as Derek settled in. Then he sighed and shook his head. Stiles looked sideways at him, suddenly suspicious.

"What," he said, not liking the tone of the man's sarcastic exhalations.

"Seriously?" Derek asked. "You thought _he_ found a hooker named _Thad_?"

Stiles balled up a fist to hit his shoulder, instantly regretting it because the fist was still bruised from decking Scott. (Still worth it.) Derek just smirked at him as Carson, across the room, chided him for unhealthy acts of violence.

*~*~*


	46. Chapter 46

**Earth: Marin County, California**

It was never a good sign when Ronon Dex made it a point to close a door. Rodney let him do it, and then, because he was suspicious by nature, walked over and propped the kitchen door open again.

"What’s that about?" he asked. "I'm here to pay your tab, then I'll be going right back where I came from."

"Not yet," said Ronon. "Tattoos first."

"Excuse me?" Teyla asked, with Rodney echoing her.

"The team is getting tattoos. We can't have the three of them with tattoos and the rest of us without," said Ronon. " _They're_ all the same. It draws lines."

"I'm not getting a tattoo," said Rodney quickly, shaking his head. Just for good measure, he put the kitchen island between himself and Thad the tattoo artist waiting patiently at the table.

"It's designed to draw lines, Ronon. Those three are skilled, they are capable of more than us. That status is allowed to be recognized," reasoned Teyla. "I see no reason why we should take that honor away from them."

"Last time we had somebody on the team outsiders could single out as different, they went and killed her for it," said Ronon. "Somebody's gonna go after _them_ , or they'll go after _us._ It screwed up Sheppard for weeks when they killed Hart. He couldn't handle it if it was one of you two. I don't _want_ to have to handle it. New tatts solve the problem."

Oh.

Rodney leaned on the island, braced for support as a new level of paranoia warred with exhaustion. He stared at the back of his knuckles, weighing it out. Ronon had a point. What kind of assumptions would they run into with a team-within-a-team being so clearly advertised to anyone they met? Maybe some off-world alien wouldn't know what the tattoos meant, but they would notice when only three of them had them. Their assumptions would be based on too many variables, because every culture was different. The AirForce wouldn't even approve of the tattoo on John's hand now, if it didn't serve as a marker that the military _wanted_ visible. 

Off-world, in Pegasus, Ronon knew better than any of them what kind of reception the tattoos would earn them. And he had a point. They were isolating the consequences to only _three_ of their team, the same as drawing targets on their backs. It was what the markers were designed to do when the military required them, though a much wider variety of potential reception.

This was not something Rodney wanted to be considering. And they didn't have long to consider it when half the team would be taken up to the Daedalus some time soon.

"Crap," he complained, beating his head lightly on his hands as he hunched over the island.

"I don't want a tattoo, Ronon," said Teyla. "And where are Blair and Derek? They should have a say in this."

"I'll get to them next," said Ronon. "But they're new. You're _you_. And Sheppard's not awake to think this one through, so I am."

Teyla crossed her arms. "In Colonel Sheppard's absence, the decision doesn't fall to _you_. As it was explained to the both of us by Director McMasters, the _order_ must come from _Lt. Colonel_ McKay."

"Oh no, don't do that," muttered Rodney. He pounded his head a few more times, trying to dislodge the stuck brain processes that refused to give him an easy way around the Satedan's logic. When he straightened up, he found both of them looking at him, expecting an answer.

"I need Sandburg," he announced. "And alcohol."

Thad the tattoo artist cleared his throat, awkwardly interrupting what felt like a domestic argument. "Technically, the state says I'm not allowed to give tattoos when someone's been drinking..."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Well, _I_ won't be calling the State inspectors for five tattoos. So do you want the job or not?"

"Rodney?" Teyla asked, surprised and _that_ was definitely her annoyed face, _yep_ , Rodney could recognize that one. He looked back at her, feeling somewhat miserable himself. He wasn't sure that he wouldn't be sick just for considering it.

"Ronon's a _Runner_ , Teyla. All tattoos, all up over everywhere... just... I _saw_ what they did to Hart," he said, quiet and stumbling and feeling guilty. "I can't assume Ronon doesn't know exactly what he's talking about. We can't risk that. I won't."

"I'm not Hart," Teyla reminded him. "Nor are you."

"Yeah, but what if some village elders decide that John or Stiles _is_?" Rodney replied. "Hell, there’s a reason we’ve got the damn uniforms. With this, we single them out as different, and there's only three of them. We outnumber them, maybe somebody thinks we outrank them, who knows. We can't have lines in the team like that. Not without risking _them_."

That seemed to make it through and Teyla’s expression changed. Rodney recognized when the annoyance traded off for concern. Finally she nodded. "Alright."

"Oh good. I think I'm gonna be sick," muttered Rodney. He put his head back down on his hands against the island.

"I'll go get Derek," said Ronon. Rodney heard him walk out of the room but didn't bother looking up. A minute later, someone had a hand on Rodney’s shoulder and a tall glass bottle shoved lightly against the back of his hand.

"Guess I'll go first then," said Blair. Rodney looked up quickly, surprised to see a bottle of something called Pisco Brandy sitting next to him on the counter. The only English words on the label he recognized were _‘Brandy’_ and _‘Peru’_ and it seemed questionable.

"What-"

"I had to empty out my office," said Blair. "So I started with the liquor cabinet."

Rodney scooped up the bottle and started working on the lid. He had three power bars for dinner. That was enough to add a shot of alcohol. "If I pass out, get Carson."

He was surprised to see Ellison walk behind them and start getting out pans like he intended to cook. Blair patted Rodney on the shoulder before going to sit down at the table with the tattoo guy. The artist stared at him, confused.

"Wait... you're a _Guide_ , Captain Sandburg... aren't there rules against... this?" Thad asked. Blair nodded and smiled at the young man.

"Technically, yes. But the team is waiving them," he said. "I won't tell the Director where I got it, I promise."

The tattoo artist didn't press the issue further, and Rodney watched as the young man set up shop right there, ready to draw blood on the kitchen table. Rodney took another swig right from the bottle.

*~*~*

At some point a few hours in, the buzzing, burning coma faded off to actual sleep. The computer would record that brainwave activity slowly climbed to normal because John remembered dreaming when he woke up. And he woke up gradually, as from sleep, without the pain and fear he had felt waking up on the Daedalus after being stuck in the chair for what felt like hours. Real sleep. No nightmares this time, no bugs or wraith or werewolves. He had always heard that flying dreams were some kind of sex metaphor, but this one didn't seem to fit the norm.

For one thing, he was flying, sure, but he had wings instead of arms. Long, wide bladed feathers at the ends instead of fingers. They were golden brown, striped with black, and they ruffled in the wind. John was definitely not a bird, but he knew the sensation, like he was surfing; he felt it where it cut through the feathers and where it slid over them. His whole body engaged as the wings pumped and he climbed higher, catching a draft to soar, and John saw massive gold-clay claws that ended in sharp talons grasp at the air to shove it away before curling into relaxed fists. He tucked his wings and dived, angled them and spun, turned on a dime and climbed back up.

An echoing screech filled the air and somehow John recognized it. It was his but it wasn't _him_. Just like the feathers and the talons. He dove low again, coming up short of a wall of calm water mere feet from breaking his neck. He saw the clear reflection of an eagle on the surface, brown and gold and black mixed with the blue-green darkness of open water. And under that, he saw fish, and beyond that, the vague shadow shape of a massive whale. John climbed again before someone got curious, or hungry.

The harsh caw of other birds broke the sound of the open air and ocean, and John swept around to find the land. It looked like the mainland back home, with the outlines of the Athosian village walls coming quickly in view. But John had never seen birds on that planet, let alone eagles and ravens.

The caw of a raven became clearer as the bird that made the noise showed up alongside, chiding his existence in the territory. He was smaller but not small, annoying but not a threat. So John kept flying where he wanted. And the raven followed, chattering and complaining. His feathers looked pretty ragged but he kept up. And he tugged at John's tail feathers mid-flight. And John climbed higher to get away. And the raven moved with him. At one point, the annoying bird flew over him, kept up with him, and landed on his back like a freeloader. John tucked his wings for a dive and the raven flapped his wings to soar off. But he looped back around and drafted him again.

The eagle screeched at the raven only to be crackled and cawed at in return. He was smaller, he could and did fly circles around him, and John was too amused by everything to take any real offense. Even the scruffy black feathers of the raven held a world of reflective color in them, sometimes blue, sometimes green, sometimes brown, and it was fun to have someone to race through the sky. And when John got tired, the raven slowed with him, and showed him a sturdy place to land. 

But it was all still just a very vivid, lucid dream, and sitting on an oceanside cliff was still all in his head. The pain John could suddenly feel in his shoulder, however, was real. And it gradually stole him away from the birds and the ocean, back to the reality of a bed and a dark room. And someone breathing on his uninjured shoulder. At least it wasn't the burning pain from the last time he had gone under, much more manageable. Frowning, John sleepily reached for the pain dial in his mind and counterbalanced it with sight to boost the light sneaking through the blackout curtains.

Rodney was tucked up next to him, not in his space but not out of it either, in his tight, uncomfortable tuck on his stomach, face turned toward John. John tried to turn toward him and realized there were electrodes and leads stuck to his head and some similar bullshit on his hand, and John had to deal with all of that before he could annoy Rodney into waking up.

"What-hey-why-" the mumbled complaints were accompanied by Rodney groggy and clumsy and trying to help untangle the leads before John brought the laptop computer down from its precarious perch on the chair next to the bed. He ended up on his knees to do it, reaching out over John to steal the computer and turn off the monitors properly once the leads were safely detached. He used John's chest as a tabletop and John was offended. But he let the computer get turned off and shut before making that known.

"Excuse you," he said, raspy and grumpy for it. Rodney reached over him again to put the laptop on the chair and push it away. The man leaned down to kiss him as a more proper greeting than using him as a piece of furniture had been. 

"Go back to sleep," Rodney ordered a moment later. "Sleep important. You only got... hours."

The words didn't quite register, John distracted by his senses. "Is that... I taste- where'd you get whiskey?"

"Brandy," corrected Rodney as he curled back up under his blanket. “ _Peruvian_ brandy.”

"Stuff I _want_ ," replied John. "Yesterday. _No_ , I wanted it a _month_ ago. Where-"

"Blair took it with him. Daedalus took it." Rodney yawned and settled back on his pillow like he intended to sleep. John rolled over and shoved at Rodney to get him off his side and pinned to the bed. 

"Nuhuh. Wake up. Talk." 

" _You_ talk," returned Rodney, probably more habit than actual challenge. He was still too drowsy.

"Why's Blair on the Daedalus?" John asked. "Why'd you break into the brandy without me?"

"Because you were in a coma. Couldn't ask you. So I made the call. Needed the brandy. And then O’Neill took everybody up to Daedalus," said Rodney. He blinked up at John, awareness slowly settling in. "You were just sleeping when we got back, so kicked Carson out. So _I_ could _sleep_. Sleep, John... sleep..." Rodney raised his hands to catch John's face between them, pressing lightly as if to shake sense into him. 

John leaned on his left elbow and caught Rodney’s right wrist in his right hand, to tug it away and get a better look at what he had felt against his face. Rodney's hand was wrapped in the same colored plastic wrap that his own had been at the beginning of the week. Like he had wrapped his palm in a strip of Hefty garbage bag from the kitchen.

"Rodney? What'd you do?" he asked. Rodney blinked at him, struggling to remember the answer to what John thought was a simple question. 

" _Oh_! Ronon wanted team tattoos. So we got them."

John stared down at him from up close, feeling confused and stuck, strangely like he had failed. "How much did you have to drink for that?"

"Mmm..." Rodney held his hand between their faces, thumb and forefinger about three inches apart. "About _that_. Much."

"Did you tell Carson?"

"Kicked out Carson," replied Rodney. John rolled his eyes. Carson probably knew and probably left voluntarily to avoid killing anyone for being dumb. After everything else, _team tattoos_. 

"Sounds like a party. You could have waited until I woke up," he complained. Rodney shook his head.

"Had to get them out of here. Argen' got away. You can't be here."

Based on the yawning and the way Rodney kept curling toward John's shoulder, the man was not at all interested in waking up to actually tell John what he had missed while he was out. Giving up, John stopped lounging on Rodney’s chest and lay down on his right side to curl up with him. He kept hold of Rodney’s hand, though, and Rodney slid right into his space, blindly figuring out how to tangle up with him despite the fact that they were individually wrapped in their own cocoons of sheets and blankets. Rodney was asleep again in minutes.

It took John a little longer. He didn't really get back to sleep, just dozed and listened to Rodney to make sure his apparently drunk self kept breathing. He was going to get on Ronon's case for bullying Rodney into drinking to get a tattoo. He could put away the beer when the city had it on offer, but John hadn't been able to get Rodney to touch anything more interesting than Weir's celebratory champagne in two years. He was annoyed he missed it.

When daylight showed up, John gave up and rolled out of bed to get himself a shower. Rodney slept through it, and through John going down to cook himself food because he hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. Basically all John's cooking was good for was MREs, scrambled eggs, and bacon, and the kitchen was short on all of the above except eggs. So he brought back eggs and toast because he couldn't exactly screw up toast. Rodney was sitting on the edge of the bed holding his head in both hands when John got back upstairs. He didn't complain much, just tucked into the food like he forgot what silverware was invented for.

"Headache?" John asked cheerfully. He sat down beside him and Rodney glared at him.

" _No_ talking," Rodney ordered.

"Hey, I haven't gotten to talk in hours," said John. "And you guys went and had a party without me. It just so happens I might have a lot to say."

Rodney squinted at him over the toast and egg sandwich he had made rather than deal with the scrape of the fork. " _Party_?"

"You have a _hangover_. Rodney, I have _tried_ to get you shitfaced so many times, and you guys went and did it without me," said John, the appropriate pout engaged.

"This was not fun, this was... I don't know. But I was sick the whole time," said Rodney. " _Not_ fun."

“Rodney.” That sobered John's mood. "What did you do?"

Rodney ate his sandwich and glared at the plate in his lap.

"McKay..."

"Ronon's a Runner," replied Rodney, a leading statement to quantify what was sure to be a bad idea. "So when he says the tattoos make you a target, I'm inclined to believe him."

"So..."

Rodney scrunched his nose and chewed at his food and stalled on answering, a tactic which John didn’t appreciate. Rodney shrugged off the annoyance and took his time. 

"So the whole team got the Sentinel marker so you and Ellison and Stiles won't get singled out like Hart did by some village idiot that doesn’t like us. You're the norm, not the exception," said Rodney finally. "And there's a team tattoo so Ronon's settled."

"I see," said John. But he didn't. Not really. He was _angry_ about it all over again. And he couldn't even say anything about being angry. His team had made the call without him. They made the call trying to protect him, though, and it wasn't one he would have asked them to do. Rodney McKay complained about food allergies and sugar levels and papercuts and treated splinters with all the severity of an animal bite, and he got himself drunk so he could get a tattoo. John could have throttled him easier than he could figure out words for the frustration he felt. He filed it away in the topics of conversation he never wanted to open again, ground his jaw, and made himself move on.

"So I take it no more Sentinel school," John said instead. "Creepy undead-mofo werewolves are all it takes to scare the Director. Good to know."

"They burned down the apartment," said Rodney, nodding slightly. "From what Blair said, Blair, Ellison, and Stiles are a threat to the whole campus if the Argents think they're here." 

"Shit." John hung his head and scrubbed at his face. "We're lucky the kid made it back here. I did see him in the Jumper last night, right? I thought I did..."

"He made it back," said Rodney. "O’Neill took them up to the Daedalus last night. He'll be back for the rest of us this morning."

"When?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask, I was trying _not_ to advertise that I was drunk, why do you think I would _talk_ to anyone with _any_ rank-" Rodney rambled on, completely disappointed in the simple question and its interference with the rest of his sandwich. 

"How long until your hangover is gone?"

"How _often_ do you think I get hangovers? _How_ would I know- why are you asking me things I don't know the answers to? _Not_ a fan-"

John ignored the complaining and stood up to retrieve Rodney’s water bottle from the desk. He sat back down and handed it over.. "Drink that. I don't have any Gatorade on me."

Rodney accepted it with a healthy dose of skepticism as he squinted over at him. "Why? _Why_ are you making me ask questions right now, John? My head hurts. This is not fun."

"I was _thinking_ ," John said, speaking over him carefully to draw his attention back. "That if we're not _here_ anymore, we're about to get shared quarters in a submarine in space. And if that's the case, as much as I want to be getting home, there's _some things_ I want to do _first_."

"Things? What things?" Rodney asked, the annoyance faded by curiosity. And a mouthful of food. John rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

"Think about it a minute. Maybe it'll help clear the hangover," he replied. Rodney mulled it over as the food disappeared. He was definitely not used to a hangover, and it was somewhat helpful for John to see; this was Rodney on a hangover, and it was not at all like Rodney’s response to John's over-use of the pain dials. Rodney had been close to some kind of breakdown then, and now he seemed much more likely to just yell. It looked different. John had a better shot of knowing when to stop pushing. Definitely made John feel worse about dragging him in on the Guide thing so blindly. He would just have to pay attention going forward. 

Rodney squinted at the plate as he set it down on the chair on top of Carson's computer. "When you say _shared quarters_..."

John nodded. "Four bunks to a berth. Carson and Ronon had the lower bunks, me and Teyla had the two up top. _Sardines_."

"I took over a couch in one of the computer labs. I mean, I _had_ a room, I was just never in it but once a day for a change of clothes, and I don't remember talking to anyone really..." said Rodney. "I'm never tired on the ships."

"No, you're _always_ tired on the ships. You just _nap_ in between crises," John corrected him. "We should probably fix that."

"What are we going to do on the trip home? You said you didn't sleep last time," said Rodney. John thought about blaming that on having had to sleep four to a room, with Carson babysitting him, but they had now spent an entire week proving it would be a lie.

"We behave ourselves," said John, carefully. "And we figure it out when we get there. In the meantime... if you've got a to-do list before we lose privacy for the next few weeks, I'll happily volunteer to get on it."

Rodney seemed to relax even though he was definitely still hungover. "You’re all bruises, John. And your wrist-"

John shrugged. "Dials work for a few hours. You could use the adrenaline boost, right?"

Rodney didn't seem sold. John held up a hand, three fingers raised. "Three weeks, Mer. Count 'em. Three."

There was a frustrating silence after that because John could tell Rodney was on his wavelength but dragging it out. He nodded finally. "Do you want that to-do list in alphabetical order or by location?" 

*~*~*

**Milky Way Galaxy: The Daedalus**

The Daedalus wasn’t exactly a huge ship. It had limited storage capacity for supplies and for human cargo after all the engines and life support systems were built in. That meant there were no more tiny dorm rooms for the Sentinel and Guide teams and Stiles had to make the hard decision between a solid night of sleep tucked in against Derek like he had gotten used to, or the morning embarrassment of roommates witnessing him snoring amidst the cuddles. It had seemed a very clear choice when they first arrived, and Stiles jumped up on the top bunk and settled in. 

But everything was too noisy in his head, thanks to the ship messing with his senses. He could hear Ellison and Blair in their bunks and he could hear about twenty other people without even trying, every conversation and every footstep, and the cafeteria was making food twenty-four-seven. It was just a constant static of input and he couldn’t figure it out. If he was supposed to sleep in noise, he needed to do more than just hear Derek. Within forty minutes he was tripping down the ladder and making a racket because he had thought he could use Stealth to sneak under another Sentinel’s radar. 

Compared to getting caught sneaking into Derek’s bed, it wasn’t as embarrassing as he’d been worried about when Ellison slapped a hand on the metal bunk bed frame to try to startle them awake.

“Wake up, gents,” Ellison announced. “There’s still work to do up here. Gotta keep at it.”

Blurry eyed and tired, Stiles grabbed Derek’s wrist to check his watch. “It’s six AM.”

“That it is. And this place is climate controlled, with no sunlight to worry about, so we’re resetting some schedules this trip,” replied Ellison. 

“Bonus: artificial gravity, lower impact workout,” added Sandburg’s voice. He was still tucked up in the upper bunk over Ellison’s and his words were muffled by his pillow. Ellison started knocking his knuckles against the bunk and Stiles could feel the metal reverberating into his spine. Derek snuck his arm back into his own space from where it had been so warm and cozy tucked around Stiles’ ribs and he started threatening to move the blankets. Stiles scowled and wedged his eyes closed, fist in his blankets to keep them from going anywhere... for important reasons. But werewolves had stupid supernatural muscles and it wasn’t a battle Stiles was destined to win. Stiles sat on the edge of the bed and sulked as Derek went and claimed the bathroom, just to add traitorous insult to injury. 

“You’re not getting out of it,” Ellison warned him, sounding what passed for amused from the old man. Stiles glanced over at Blair.

“How come _he’s_ sleeping in?” he asked, grumpy, because screw artificial gravity bonus facts. 

“Nuh uh. Jim and I sorted this one out years ago. Sentinels-in-space aren’t going to switch that one up,” said Blair. “Nobody makes me get outta bed until oh-seven-thirty at the earliest. _Nobody_.”

Ellison huffed a laugh at that and shook his head. Admitting defeat, Stiles dug around under the bunk for his duffel bag to find clothes he could run in. Derek was back before Stiles had found clothes and Stiles then locked himself in the tiny bathroom and found a corner, trying to fall asleep against the wall for a minute. It didn’t work very well, but he tried. 

Twenty minutes later, they were running laps around the Daedalus’ hangar bay. It was the safest place to run without running into people, and it was just plain really cool. Ellison wouldn’t let Stiles actually walk up to the cool space-planes tucked away in the hangar but he couldn’t stop him from looking at them. 

“Do they fly like the Jumpers?” Stiles wanted to know. He looked to Ellison. “D’you think we can fly them, like we could the Jumpers?”

“Nope,” said Jim. “No idea. They’re AirForce experimental craft, that’s all I got on them. Neither of us are AirForce.”

“Oh. What about Sheppard, then?”

“He’s Homeworld, like us,” said Derek. Stiles scowled ahead as he dismissed them both.

“Man, you guys suck today,” he complained. Ellison smirked to himself. 

“Guess that’s another lap then, huh?” he asked.

Derek shoved at Stiles’ shoulder for it, which started a race, which basically killed Stiles ten times faster than if he _hadn’t_ risen to the bait, and made the extra lap extra annoying. 

Stiles was better when they finally let him have breakfast. He was on a spaceship. In space. He was surrounded by noise and constant stimuli. Even with a mostly-functioning climate control, Stiles was sometimes feeling perfect and other times, he could feel the heat coming off of pieces of equipment, computers, other humans, and then he swore he could feel extra cold zones whenever he got close to doors that led off to to access airlocks. The hangar with the Jumpers and space-fighter-jet-thingys was very cold, to Stiles, but he still liked it better there. It was generally quieter in the hangar.

When Blair caught up with them at breakfast, he put coffee and a book down in front of Stiles.

“You’re reading,” he said. “As long as you can possibly manage.”

Stiles actually didn’t have a complaint about that. Blair even slid over a tablet for taking notes, one that looked a bit heartier than the iPad that Derek had been given. It had a sturdy case with the SGC emblem on the back. 

Stiles blinked at him. “What-”

“Carter dropped stuff by,” Blair said. “That, and your uniforms. Ours, actually. Caldwell doesn’t want me on deck in this.” He tugged at the jacket he had worn out and augmented years ago as flying-F-U to the rules the Sentinel Project made him follow.

“He’s not gonna like Rodney’s either,” Stiles pointed out. 

“Rodney doesn’t like Rodney’s,” replied Blair, shaking his head. “Anyway. Sam said O’Neill made the call. We’re on Rodney’s science team. She said the General said John and Rodney could fight out our schedules from there, but he wasn’t going to put us in the field.”

Blair glanced at Jim at that news, not looking entirely comfortable with it. Stiles didn’t understand.

“Colonel said we would be going with them. Off-world,” he said. Blair nodded.

“Sure. When I clear you guys,” said Blair. “And unless the civilian commander of the city says otherwise, my plan there is that John doesn’t go through the Stargate until he’s at least a month out from any serious zone outs. You guys go chasing this stuff too deep, man. Who knows if you’ll ever make it back if the wormhole messes with you.”

Stiles’ mouth dropped open. Derek blinked and leaned forward. “Wait- wormhole?”

Blair and Jim looked at each other then back at Stiles and Derek. “Uhm...” said Blair. Jim sighed and stood up. He tapped the table to get their attention and then waved a hand up to get them moving.

“Let’s go suit up and see if our team is up here yet,” said Ellison. Blair nodded and started stacking up the things he had brought for Stiles as an added hint.

“This isn’t stuff we can explain. It’ll have to be Rodney or Sam, preferably,” said Blair.

“ _Wormholes_?” repeated Stiles. Blair nodded patiently. 

“Yes. We’ll go ask the scientists,” he said as Derek tugged Stiles out of his chair.

*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ___________________________________________________
> 
> Okay, I'm not any kind of an artist but I had to try to get it down, and I'm sure some folks will want to know... so let's see if this works...


	47. Chapter 47

**Earth: Marin County, California**

Rodney’s to-do list was not cut short by a knock on the door, injury, or any form of breaking furniture as he had perhaps considered might be enough to warrant the interruption. No. John probably would have forgiven him for any of those inconvenient abandonments of their plans. Instead, it was Rodney’s fault. And he admitted it, owned it, and still made John help him with the flash of brilliance that he swore up and down would make it worth it.

“Three weeks of _worth it_?” asked John, half pouting and half glaring as Rodney started digging through one of his backpacks for a tool kit.

“Yes,” said Rodney. He hesitated and then added, “And besides, you’re still off duty, roommates won’t be in the same quarters all day.”

John rolled his eyes at him for it. “You can’t hang a sock on a sliding door, Mer.”

“What do socks have to do-”

“Nevermind.”

And John had sat there on the bed, wrapped in blankets with him, and held tiny pieces of the earwig communicator as Rodney cannibalized it to work the modern Tau’ri technology into the Ancient communicators he had tested on Ellison and Stiles the day before. It worked then, but Rodney wasn’t satisfied with the three Ancient communicators only communicating with each other.

It took a lazy hungover morning of intense sex and forty minutes of frustration from John for Rodney to get the two different frequencies to talk to each other without - _theoretically_ \- interrupting the connection between the Ancient device and the Sentinel-sensitive ATA voodoo. Rodney sealed off the two tiny transmitters and then put away the tool box. In hindsight, it wasn’t a project he should have been doing while wrapped in a sheet; he probably should have gotten dressed first, but that would have taken too much time. The solution was there, at the front of his brain, and he wasn’t going to risk it disappearing. And if the connections worked, even an accident _might_ have been worth it.

Rodney handed the Ancients communicator over to John. “Here. The wide part sits around the front of your ear instead of the back like ours. That’s the mic... what you would call the speaker rests behind... like that.”

John let him adjust how it sat and, out of habit, reached up to try to figure out how to turn the comm on. Rodney shook his head at him.

“Ancient tech. No buttons, no volume dials,” he reminded him. John nodded and tried to mess with the device anyway, tried to knock it off his ear. It seemed secure enough. Rodney settled his own radio mic in his ear. “Try it already. Raise the Daedalus.”

John’s eyes went wide, like he didn’t believe Rodney could flip a few switches and let him have such instant contact with the rest of his team after a month of radio silence. Still, he shrugged and tried it.

“Daedalus, this is Sheppard. Copy.” There was a lengthy quiet from both headsets, based on the frown sneaking over John’s lips. “Daedalus, come in.”

“Colonel Sheppard, this is Daedalus. When did you get cleared for a radio?”

At Caldwell’s voice over the connection, John jolted, sitting upright and shuffling the sheets over his lap to pull them snug. “Colonel, sir. I’m technically not on the radio. This is McKay’s doing. Testing something.”

“Is it going to blow up my ship?”

“Nosir,” said John quickly, speaking before Rodney could lodge a formal complaint on the connection. “Sir, AR-1 is ready for transport whenever convenient.”

There was a pause before Caldwell came back. “Expect it soon. Anything else, Colonel?”

“Nosir. Just a ride home.”

“Then we’ll get on it,” replied Caldwell. “Daedalus out.”

John pulled the communicator off his ear like it had bit him and then reached over and pulled the earwig carefully away from Rodney. The look on his face was relief and surprise as he reached to put the radios on the chair by the bed that now held a laptop, various wires, and a tool box. Rodney wasn’t sure what to make of the reaction.

“What? It worked,” he began. “That’s a good thing-”

“It’s perfect, Mer,” John assured him, untangling the sheets and blankets from around the both of them so they could stand up. He tugged on Rodney’s hands to pull him to the bathroom. “I just don’t want my boss’ voice _inside my head_ for the next twenty minutes.”

Oh.

And after a longer than necessary hot shower, the both of them were cleaned up, shaved, fully presentable, and back in Atlantis colors, with the proper patches on their shoulders where they belonged. John was still a mess of bruises underneath the dark jacket, but he kept his sunglasses hung from his shirt collar.

They were an odd sort of matched set, Rodney with his mostly healed cut along his forehead, and John with his pair of werewolf stripes along his jaw. But there was a sense of normalcy as they stood shoulder to shoulder and checked the final look in the bathroom mirror. Beat-up and smiling in the slate-colored jackets of Atlantis.

They did return the room to the original layout and cleaned up after themselves. Collected their gear and made sure they left nothing behind but dirty sheets and blankets in the bathroom laundry hamper designed for that purpose. Maybe they had their issues with the Sentinel Project and would be glad to leave it in the rear view, but even Rodney was partial to the dorm.

Only then did they leave their room to go track down the rest of the team. They found them downstairs, in the lobby, with their bags piled by the door.

"What’s this about you and the radio?" Carson wanted to know. John left the communicator on his ear but turned his head so the doctor could witness the device without touching it.

"No sound, no white noise," he reported. "I hear it in my head."

Carson's jaw dropped and he stepped back, surprised at the implications. "Oh my."

Rodney bounced on his toes, proud of himself. "And it should quiet down the interference on the Daedalus. And I'm hoping on Atlantis, too."

Carson seemed happy about it, if maybe a little suspicious, but Teyla was smiling. Ronon stood up from the uncomfortable looking bench furniture and moved to collect his bag.

"We can leave now?" he asked.

"Whenever our ride gets here, big guy," John replied. He checked his watch with the same impatience Ronon showed, but he didn't radio for a status check.

"Awhell," he muttered, the smile faded fast. Rodney followed his attention and saw Director McMasters walking up the steps to the glass door. "We timed our exit wrong."

Tucking his right hand in his pocket, Rodney nodded his agreement and edged closer to John, unconsciously half a step in front of him. Ronon raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms. Teyla moved to greet McMasters with her usual diplomacy as Carson turned his attention to collecting his gear rather than involve himself.

Teyla was met with a warmth Rodney didn't think the Director was physically capable of, and the two women clasped hands like old friends. It was something Teyla did with a lot of people in their off-world excursions to meet with her contacts and trading partners. It was who Teyla was, but to see it mirrored by the Project Director, that was mildly surreal.

The Director automatically noticed the wrap on Teyla’s hand. It looked like they had rewrapped the tattoos that morning and of course all Teyla and Ronon would have had with them was a field dressing.

"Are you hurt?" the Director asked, concern on her face as she changed how she held Teyla’s hand to be sure she wasn't causing pain. Teyla shook her head quickly and pulled her hands back to tuck demurely behind herself.

"Oh, no. Ronon, well, he wanted to get tattoos while we were here in _civilization_ again," she said diplomatically, rolling her eyes. "I was in the mood to agree. It will be a long while before we are through this way again."

"We got 'em yesterday," said Ronon helpfully. He kept his hands tucked in his arms, the sleeves of his jacket easily hiding the bandage. The Director didn't seem to suspect anything of it and laughed it off like Teyla had set her up to. Rodney tried not to fidget as his hand started to remind him it didn't like being stabbed with needles now that he was thinking about it.

"I've been notified that General O’Neill is en route," McMasters said, speaking to Teyla but broadening it to include her team. She looked to John briefly before settling her attention on Rodney. "So I've come to see you off."

"Gee, that's nice," said John. "You don't have to go out of your way."

McMasters sighed and stepped away from Teyla to deal with the Sentinel team. "I'm relieved to see you back on your feet, Colonel Sheppard. Your adventure had your team worried."

"I can see how it might," he replied. "Wasn't my idea, but... sorry about that."

"I'll work with Blair on the report this afternoon," Rodney added. The sarcasm from John was painfully obvious, even to Rodney, and he was worried they were going to somehow end up in detention if Sheppard kept it up.

"That's good, thank you," said the Director, apparently pleasantly surprised by the promise. "And thank you for letting General O’Neill's team take the lead on things last night. I saw that it wasn't easy on you, but from what I heard from the General, you handled yourself well."

That was a surprise and Rodney didn't know what to say to it.

"My team has been working together for a while now, Director. They know how to handle themselves," said Sheppard. He was being territorial again, but not a jerk about it at least. "However they'd have chosen to handle it, I'm confident I would still be standing here this morning."

"Yes, I'm sure," replied McMasters. "Though the coma was a less than desirable outcome."

"Still classified," said John, smiling and far too pleased to be able to say that. "But either way, I'm fine."

"Thankfully, yes, it seems so," said the Director brightly. "So while less than ideal, it seems to have worked out."

"As I told you it would," replied Rodney. John smirked and bumped his shoulder.

"Yes, you did. As I said, I think you handled things well, and I'm glad you were successful," said McMasters. She crossed her arms and looked to John. "I wanted to catch Colonel Sheppard, however, before you left."

"I'm here until the General says otherwise," said John.

"To be perfectly honest, what you are is a pain in the ass," said McMasters, the conversational smile unwavering. "And as I told Dr. McKay yesterday, I don't think you're ready to handle yourself, let alone a full team. So I would ask that you keep in mind the hundreds of Sentinel teams that Captains Sandburg and Ellison have helped over the years, and that you honor that by not wasting my team. Don't waste their time, don't waste their talents. I can't replace them, so get yourself in line so it will at least be worth it."

" _My_ team," John corrected her. "And we'll, I dunno, fight some bad guys or something to make it up to you. Sandburg and I did pretty good last night, bagged ourselves a domestic _terrorist_. That's just two of us. Out of, what, are we _eight_ now? I'm a little rusty on my math. But I think, whether you're looking forward to it or not, Director, we might just do alright for ourselves."

"Please do," said the Director.

John straightened up slightly and then a heartbeat later, Rodney heard the crackle of the radio in his own ear.

"O’Neill to AR-1. Your taxi is out front," came O'Neill's voice in the earwig. Rodney started to reach for his bags, but he remembered his bandaged hand and hesitated, stalling to keep it hidden. John looked out the windows at the parking lot, a frown on his face.

"Where, sir?" he asked, coming in crystal clear in Rodney's headset.

"Same place I double parked last night," said the General.

"Copy that. I'm sure somebody can get me there," replied John. He scooped up his pack and one of Rodney's, leaving just one duffel and the backpack leaning on Rodney’s leg, both easily seen to one-handed. John edged him toward the door then, hand out in invitation to make it perfectly clear he wanted Rodney to move.

"Director, if you'd excuse us, the General is here. We'll be on our way," he said, quick and tight and on his way out. Because he was stubborn, John picked up one of Carson's gear bags, too. Ronon took it from him at the door though, smirking at him as John forfeited the heavy bag with the medical equipment in it without any kind of a protest. Carson followed after.

Rodney hung back, waiting for Teyla to offer her more polite goodbye as he held the door for her. Not out of any kind of archaic chivalry at all that Teyla had never quite cottoned on to, but more because John's territorial attitude was mildly contagious and he wanted to be sure the Director didn't try to keep Teyla.

"Good luck," McMasters told them as they left. Teyla offered a pleased _'Thank you,'_ and Rodney just nodded. Then they hurried to catch up as the others crossed the half-empty parking lot to the small forgotten parking area to the side of the entrance that seemed to be O'Neill's preferred landing strip.

"Sir, mind if I drive?" Rodney heard John ask just as he and Teyla made it to the gate of the otherwise cloaked Jumper. Once they were in, the gate closed.

"Are you cleared to do that?" O’Neill asked.

"Yes!" Rodney said quickly.

"Technically, no," said Carson.

"Sandburg wanted me to fly after the last weird blackout," John pointed out, all sincere innocence.

"Coma, Sheppard. _Co-ma_ ," replied O’Neill.

" _I_ want him to fly this time," added Rodney. "I want to know how the flight controls react with the communicator."

"How are they _supposed_ to react?" John asked, suspicious.

"How should I know? They came from the Jumper. They should be compatible," replied Rodney.

" _Should_ ," echoed O'Neill. "Should I remind you that you're _on_ this flight?"

Rodney considered that but squared his shoulders. "It's fine."

The General looked to Carson, receiving a shrug, before he stood and kicked John out of the copilot's chair.

*~*~*

**Milky Way Galaxy: The Daedalus**

New uniforms were a sufficient distraction from the subject of wormholes. And the larger challenge was finding a place to put them because there was no room to be tripping over boxes in their "quarters" on the Daedalus.

The Atlantis uniforms were alright, but Stiles knew he was going to miss his flannels. They were handy, a good barrier against not too hot and not too cool, and color variety was a good thing. Now he had a jacket that he had to roll the sleeves up, and sometimes zipped and other times not, and the fact that there were zippered panels on the front baffled him because exactly how was _that_ supposed to work? But he did like the slate gray and blue combo. The tan and blue wasn't his favorite, but he had two of each, and a week's worth of pants and light blue shirts, all of it his.

Derek looked annoyingly good in the darker jacket. The man wasn't fair. And the fact that he was afraid of Ellison and Sheppard wasn't fair, either, because three weeks of dealing with hypersensitive roommates was going to drive Stiles up the walls.

Stiles had to unpack everything just so he could repack everything and not have to deal with a box. His pillow lost its luggage safety zone and would have to be carried off ship when they left. Stiles shoved the pillow next to the one currently on Derek's bunk because he planned on their arrangement continuing. Especially if he was going to have to wake up at six am. Maybe Sheppard would change that. He hoped. He would make the appeal. Six AM was too early.

It was ten AM before Sheppard showed up. He still looked beat up, but he was smiling when they met him at the hangar. Rodney was even smiling. The scientist automatically handed an Ancient communicator over to Stiles when Stiles climbed up into the open Jumper.

"I got that one fixed. Try it out," he said. Stiles sorted out the front from the back and set up the communicator like he had the night before. The moment it was in place, things got... quieter. Stiles ducked instinctively as his hearing sharpened and the static he had been living with clarified into individual sounds and the temperature in the hangar plummeted. He swore and grabbed for Derek.

"Dials!" Sheppard said, a bit of advice that would have been useful thirty seconds earlier. Derek started talking quietly and Stiles could block out the far-away voices again, following just the sound of his voice and contrasting it to the sound of his breathing and his heart beat until he found the middle ground. He started tugging on Derek’s shirt, a slow smile on his face as he tracked a single set of people on the ship - the people immediately around him - instead of the fifty people on their corner of the level and a few dozen air compressors and mechanical whizzing and a metric ton of white noise.

"What-" began Blair. Blair and Ellison had stayed outside of the craft so Rodney walked out to the end of the ramp. He held the remaining communication device up so Blair could see what he had given Stiles.

"It's a communication device that responds to the ATA. In theory, it breaks up the interference between the ATA and the Ancient tech because they're always connected to it, like a filter, but I won’t have more of an idea there until I can query the database," Rodney explained. The man was even managing to be quiet. "For now, it works. And I've got two of them capable of picking up on our radio frequencies. It'll take me a half hour to get the last one done for Ellison."

"The static's gone," Stiles said, still smiling. "Oh my god."

"It's not perfect, still gotta work for it, but... damn," said Sheppard, agreeing with a smile. Ellison looked very interested. Stiles started to take it off, just to see if he could adjust to it. There was a weird warping sort of sound and his senses spiked as the static came back, but it didn't hit him as hard.

"So weird..." he started to hand it to Ellison. "You wanna try?"

"Might not work. Ancient tech tends to imprint. But you can try," said Rodney. Ellison considered it but he shook his head.

"I'll wait," he said.

“Half an hour,” Rodney promised. He picked up his stuff from where it had been stowed and asked if anyone knew where they were staying yet. The team was in a strangely good mood and Colonel Carter stared at Rodney with her mouth hanging open.

“Carson?” she asked, sounding worried.

“Don’t look at me. This whole trip. He just sat and worked on it, didn’t have a cross word, neither one of ‘em,” said the doctor.

“Sorry, Colonel. We just want to be getting home,” said Sheppard. “Give him a few hours, he’ll be yelling again.”

Rodney shrugged. “Are we working on the ‘gate bridge for the duration? I expect my cheerful outlook on life won’t last long if I’ll be working with Grant and Durham again.”

“Hey...” Sheppard suddenly realized something that killed his cheerful outlook rather quickly. He pointed at Derek and then at Ellison. “Wrong colors. My team... should not be blue.”

“Civilians,” said Jack O’Neill easily. “Not putting them in military uniforms. Think it’s fair to say a smart man learns that lesson from the state of McKay and Sandburg’s jackets at the Project.”

Rodney brightened up again quickly. “So they’re my team?”

“No,” said Sheppard.

O’Neill clapped the Colonel on the shoulder and moved past him. “I figured you two would argue about it either way. This at least keeps things nice and tidy for payroll.”

“We’re getting new jackets,” said Sheppard. He still grabbed one of the duffels Rodney had dragged out and made his way out of the Jumper finally.

“They’re mine until we’re cleared for duty, no new jackets,” said Rodney, following after him.

“Still my team, Rodney.”

“Sure, off-world. Just not on paper.” The reality of the suggested compromise came out harsher than intended apparently and Rodney quickly added, “I mean, on Atlantis.”

“You should stop talking and start finding some place to work on Ellison’s radio,” said Sheppard. “You promised a half hour. Clock’s ticking.”

“If you could also make some time today to brief your team on the specifics of the mission,” said Colonel Carter. “Now that they’re in a secure enough location to do so.”

“Yeah,” said Stiles, seconding that. “You didn’t say _anything_ about wormholes.”

“Well, yeah,” replied Sheppard with a shrug. “The wraith are the larger concern in the grand scheme of things. The eggheads take care of the ‘gate. You don’t have to know how the ‘gate works to use it. We got time.”

The conversation was cut short by Caldwell showing up at the door before they got to it. He greeted the General and the group made with the pleasantries and then he singled out McKay and Carter.

"Novak and Hermiod have some diagnostics they need you to look at, Colonels," he said. "It's holding up departure so if you wouldn't mind..."

"Now?" asked Rodney. The Colonel nodded.

" _Now_. Okay..." Rodney looked down at his duffel. Sheppard stared at the ceiling as the extra bag was dropped at his boots and Rodney hurried to leave with Sam.

And that set the tone for the rest of the trip. Rodney running between the command deck and various labs. Carson tucked away with the other doctors in the medical bay labs. General O’Neill and Colonel Carter took the transporter back, but Daniel Jackson stayed with them, and Rodney bugged him every day to teach Derek how to _at_ _least_ read Ancient. And that meant that Blair and Stiles got in on the lessons, because _aliens_.

Sheppard didn't argue it, even though it made it very clear that McKay had hijacked his team for the science labs. He stuck to Ronon, Teyla, and Ellison when the rest were busy. He eventually got them briefed on the Pegasus expedition and the SGC and everything he knew in between, including a tour of the armory, and a detailed explanation of why he did not want them arguing with Zat guns.

About a week into the trip, cabin fever was settling in, and Blair especially was getting really short tempered with Ellison and Sheppard. Particularly when it came to the topic of physical training or range training. Which made things very weird considering they had shoved all three Sentinel teams in one room so the Atlantis-bound crew only had to take up two extra rooms. Jim took a top bunk and the other two teams crammed into the lower bunks. But even still, Stiles could tell the Guide was upset, stuck in close quarters, and it didn't even work to hide under Derek to try to get some sleep.

Normally, for something like that, he would have asked Blair about it. What to do. But that didn't seem like a great idea under the circumstances.

It eventually started hitting Rodney, and he started sleeping less. Showing up around midnight and then waking up and leaving by three am. And Derek started getting snappish, but he said it was lack of sleep. Which just set them all off cranky. John finally hit the lights when Rodney tried to sneak off to go work at three am, and instead made sure _everyone_ was up.

“Okay! I need somebody to translate, because I know it’s not me this time,” he announced, standing in front of the door in his boxers and beat up t-shirt with his arms crossed. The werewolf bite visible on his shoulder was still angry and hadn’t yet started to heal, but the scratches on his face had gotten smaller, and he kept his broken wrist in the brace. He wasn’t in pain as much anymore and it was obvious, so it probably wasn't him messing with his Guide.

“Not it,” said Stiles quietly, staying tucked with the blankets up to his chin. He was mostly healed up, and even the tattoo didn’t feel much worse than a sunburn. Behind him, Derek sat up to look out at the others. Rodney sat on the edge of the lower bunk yawning but looking like he wanted to leave.

“Translate what?” Rodney asked.

“This,” said John. “It’s three am. You’re tired. You’re not sleeping, and everyone in here knows it. It’s the avoidance thing again. And I am on edge. Something’s wrong. Fire-alarm wrong. So what is it.”

Up on the bunk above, the mattress squeaked and Stiles could tell Jim sat up. “Chief? You done marinating in it yet or what?”

Stiles sat up to show he was awake, since it was obvious the adults weren't going to let whatever it was slide.

"I could just sleep on the couch in the lab," said Rodney. "That's what it's there for."

"You are picking up on something, the same as the rest of us," said Derek. "And I don't think anyone sleeping on the couch would fix it."

"It wouldn’t," said Jim. "Just makes it worse."

"Sandburg, it's been a week. What the hell happened?" John asked.

Blair finally sat up, a moment later dropping down to the floor, because he was Blair and if he didn't pace, he waved his hands, and there was more room for that on the floor. Saved Stiles a crick in the neck, too.

"Back in Beacon Hills. Jim decided to blame the Sunrise Patriots for the two hunters who were killed-"

"Killed?" Rodney asked as Stiles tuned in to the word "Hunters?"

"Hunters. Two. Plural. Killed," said Blair. "By a couple of guys in military uniforms with a chopper for backup. That's why Kincaid showed up. And not only did he show up, he burned down our place. He came back in a big way. Because we blamed a couple of murders on him."

"They were going to shoot McKay! They were going down," said John, not at all apologetic. "I told you that."

"Yeah, after _Kincaid_ threw it in my face," said Blair. "And that's my problem here. I found out about it from him. Not either of you. And this could still blow up in our faces because they got Kincaid in custody. And he'll make sure to tell whoever will listen."

There was a guilty silence from Sheppard and Ellison.

"Hunters get rid of their messes," Stiles offered quietly. "My dad didn't know they existed until he got bit. There was never any evidence. No bodies."

"We know they have Zat guns," Rodney pointed out. "Maybe the _evidence_ is... zapped."

"Maybe. We don’t know. And we're two weeks out from the problem. If we say anything about it now, we're all court-martialed for covering it up. The point being, you two made that call, and it hits _all_ of us, and you didn’t tell any of us," said Blair, looking between Jim and John and keeping his voice very quiet. "When shit goes south, you're supposed to tell your Guide. You're in our heads, we're in yours, we don't do it alone. That's the number one thing here. You should trust us enough to let us know something like that is coming for us. And you _didn’t_."

Sheppard scrubbed at his face and scowled at the floor. The quiet dragged and he went to sit by Rodney. "Okay. I'm sorry, I helped fuck that one up," he said.

"You think?" Rodney muttered at him. Stiles stared over at them, worried and anxious. Blair wasn't someone who got mad very easily, the opposite of Jim or Rodney who had no real patience. It was obviously a big deal, and Stiles had no idea what would happen to him if the others were packed off and court-martialed. Derek wouldn't be safe anymore, either. They would have to figure out how to disappear, and it wasn't exactly easy to do that from a spaceship. Stiles felt Derek rub at his back and realized he had started holding his breath as the anxiety flared.

"So... what do we do?" Stiles asked, trying to get out of his own head on it.

"There's nothing we can do. That's why I didn't say anything," replied Blair. He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall between the bunks. "I'm just not used to worrying about the team side-effects. It's always been Jim and me and now it's not. You guys are ten times more perceptive than any team we've ever monitored. I didn't know this would happen."

"You've been snapping at us for days, Chief. Don't be daft. Just jack down and let it go. After this long, someone would have said something if they were going to. You're worrying for nothing," said Jim.

"That's literally my job," said Blair. "And you know that as well as I do. Don't tell me what to do, Jim."

"I'm just saying..."

"You’re just being an ass," corrected Blair. "Way to miss the point."

"The point being?" Jim asked. Even from the bottom bunk, Stiles could tell Ellison was being bullishly dense.

"The point being, when we fuck up, we tell the Guides," said Stiles. "And if it hits the team, we tell the team."

"That's supposed to go both ways," Jim added. Blair glared up at him.

"It fucking does," he replied.

"Okay!" Sheppard said, quick and loud to keep them from going at each other's throats. "Message received, we fucked up. We all know it now. Going forward, it won't happen. Right?"

Stiles nodded, letting Derek voice their agreement. He had been telling Derek every stupid thing that happened in his life for months anyway. Rodney was a little slower but he nodded when John looked at him.

"It doesn’t fix it because we can't. But next time if it happens, there's the whole team to answer to. Before we start making each other crazy," Sheppard said.

"Yeah," came Ellison’s voice. He was still grating on Blair's nerves.

"Look, do you guys need the room or something?" Stiles asked.

"That doesn't work for us," said Blair. He shook his head and went to grab his bag. "I'll go walk it off."

"Ellison’s gonna join you," said Sheppard, in the Colonel-voice. Ellison grunted his opinion of that, but he jumped down off the bed. Blair had already claimed the bathroom so Ellison dug for clothes in his suitcase. Sheppard stared at the floor.

"Figure it out or I cheat and get Carson involved, counseling or something," he said, quiet. "We're not breaking the Guides over those assholes."

"Roger that," replied Ellison. "He'll be fine."

"You don't know that," Rodney said. "He was just kidnapped less than a week ago, your home got trashed, _and_ you both technically lost your jobs. He's been _spaced_ and he wasn’t expecting it. Maybe he's _not_ fine."

Jim seemed to consider it and nodded agreement. "We'll check in."

They left a few minutes later, but Stiles was still awake, slouched into Derek’s space.

"You two okay?" Sheppard asked, just to be sure.

"I'm fine," said Derek, and he probably was, with his stupid werewolf _everything_. Stiles shrugged and nodded.

"You get that feeling of, like, nails or something scratching down your bones?" he asked. Sheppard gave an affirmative so Stiles figured that was what he meant by sensing fire alarms.

"I think I need to be working," said Rodney. John scrubbed at his face and stood up.

"Then let's go. I can sleep on the couch," he said.

Stiles keeled sideways and tugged the blanket back over his head. He would not risk being ordered awake when there was an otherwise empty room for even just a half an hour. Sheppard tossed off a " _Behave yourselves_ ," before they left.

And they probably would have if they hadn’t been told to.

*~*~*


	48. Chapter 48

**Milky Way Galaxy: The Daedalus**

Rodney lived on coffee on the Daedalus because the ship had a reliable supply. As opposed to Atlantis, which ran out every other month and he had to rely on tea from Teyla and the botany department. Katie had found him a passable substitute with a high caffeine content and some protein as a bonus, but it just wasn't the same. So Rodney sat at his borrowed desk, hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, at four AM, and stared at the equation on the screen. It should work. But it wasn't. And his brain was stuck.

He glanced over the edge of the screen at where John slouched on the couch, arms folded under his jacket and legs reached out to cross at his ankles in as horizontal as the couch would allow without him lying down to take up the whole thing. No one else was in there yet, John could have taken the couch all to himself, but he just sat there with sunglasses over his face like it was impossible for anyone to know the Lt. Colonel slept.

"I thought I might find you here," came Teyla’s voice, just off his shoulder. Rodney startled and splashed coffee on the desk.

"Oh my- Teyla, sorry," muttered Rodney, scrambling to wipe the coffee away before it got on the computers. "What- what are you doing here?"

"Ronon and I have had trouble sleeping of late. He's working with some Marines in the gym. I felt inclined to check on you instead," she said warmly. 

"All good here," said John from the couch. "Mornin', Teyla."

"Go back to sleep," Rodney ordered. "You'll zone if you don't get sleep."

"I'll sleep in bed. For now, I nap," said John.

"You are welcome to find that baseline _any_ time," replied Rodney. "I sustain on very little sleep and I don't see this working out well for you in the long term."

John still sat stretched out and unreadable under his sunglasses. "Why d'you think I like my naps, McKay? Shut up and build my bridge."

"It's not your bridge, it's my bridge," Rodney complained.

"You took my team, I'll take your bridge," said John.

Rodney would have continued but Teyla set a hand on his arm to guide him off rising to the taunt. "You could try sleeping, Rodney."

"I did. Something close to three hours. I'm fine," he said.

"He lies," said John.

"So do you," said Rodney. 

"Why?" Teyla asked. That was an open ended question and Rodney blinked at her.

"Sentinel thing," he said, even as John replied with "Guide thing."

"This is not our fault, I remind you," said Rodney. 

"I said I was sorry," replied John. "Well, about the one part. Not about the other."

"Well, the problem is the one part, not the other," said Rodney. 

"Not the worst thing either of us have ever done," said John. He turned his head just slightly. "We good?"

Rodney ruffled slightly but nodded. "Just tell me next time."

"Promise, Mer." And John settled back into his nap with some rustling of his jacket. Teyla looked between them, eyebrows raised.

"What exactly-"

"Long story," replied John.

" _That's_ not sleeping," said Rodney. 

"Rodney, please explain," said Teyla, slightly snappish as she tried to get between their bickering.

"John and Ellison decided not to tell us about-"

"An arrangement-"

"-an arrangement they made in Beacon Hills, and Blair's been understandably upset about it a while now," said Rodney, carefully pausing to slurp at his coffee.

"Is it the arrangement from outside the helicopter?" Teyla interrupted to ask. John nodded.

"Very same," replied John. "Of which we do not speak."

Rodney balked at this new news. "She knew about it?" 

"Teyla was there, and I know she's not going to tell anyone," said John. He lifted the sunglasses slightly and peeked at her from under the edge. "Ever. Anyone. Seriously."

Teyla nodded. "Of course not."

"This is kind of Blair's whole point," complained Rodney.

"Copy that, Mer."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "You know, you can’t get out of trouble by calling me that."

"I _like_ it. I'm not trying to get out of trouble. I'm trying to nap and remembering the last time I called you that. And you didn't get on my case about it. That was nice," said John, settled in under his jacket with a slight smile.

Rodney remembered and blushed to his ears and turned his attention quickly to his coffee. Teyla was at least grinning again, though she was still not settled. 

"So, you were saying, about this Sentinel and Guide problem..." Teyla said. "That has you both in a lab at this early hour."

"Right. Blair is angry, and has been for a few days, apparently," said Rodney, glad to refocus on something not John. "And because of whatever it is that responds to the ATA, which I really have to get with Carson to figure that out, there is a chain reaction, it seems. The team picks up on something being wrong. And I can't sleep, and John's paranoid more than usual, and everyone is... cranky, for lack of a better way to put it. It's annoying. And I'm here working off the adrenaline boost it triggers. And John's over there not sleeping because... I don't know, actually. "

"Perhaps that explains Ronon, Daniel, and I," said Teyla, thoughtfully processing. John gave up pretending to sleep then. He sat up and slid the sunglasses off his face, set his jacket aside. 

"Say again?" he asked.

"We've been working closely with the others for a week," said Teyla. "And different things have come up. Daniel is having trouble containing his shifts, he and Ronon have had to back off training and I've been working with him more on controlled movements. And the trouble sleeping."

"Oh crap," said Rodney, looking over as John stood up. 

"Is Carson awake?" he asked. Teyla shook her head. "Well, he needs to be. Could you run him down? I'll go find Ellison and Blair. I want everybody in the medbay A-sap."

"What? Why?" asked Rodney. 

"Because if there is the slightest possibility that we're somehow amplifying this whatever it is outside of the Sentinel and Guide teams, I want it looked at. And I want us quarantined until we know the extent of it. Daniel's too new. His control can't slip on the Daedalus."

"That's ridiculous-" But as Rodney considered it, John waited him out, nodding as Rodney realized they didn't know enough about how Guides responded to high ATA. "Crap. Maybe."

" _Maybe_ is good enough. Blair's team hasn't been able to test this before. So we'll start with us, and he can figure out the details of what to get back to the Project," said John. "For now, I want Ronon and everybody else at hand. Carson can see what's going on with all of us. Narrow it down."

With an order through the radio, John called his team to the med labs and they each were poked and prodded for samples to get Carson started on understanding what could possibly be effecting Daniel, Ronon, and Teyla that _wasn't_ hitting Carson just as hard as it hit everyone else. They could maybe excuse the Sentinel and Guides because they shared quarters, but they were nowhere near Carson's quarters and pheromones or hormones or bad body odor shouldn't be having any effect from that distance. 

Watching Carson draw blood was the first time Rodney had paid any attention to the tattoos on the team's hands, too. 

"I thought we agreed no red?" he said, annoyed as Ronon held still for the blood draw.

"Wasn't leaving Ellison on his own," replied Ronon with a shrug. John frowned at that.

"Teyla’s is different than everyone else's entirely," he said. Rodney gaped, realizing the tattoo she had chosen was the same general size and made up of pieces to form the shape of a bird, but it was in faded white with no defined black line edges. Stiles grabbed Derek’s right hand and offered it up.

"They match, it's fine," he said. Rodney blinked. The tattoo was solid black, no color at all. They matched only in that they were the exact opposite of each other on the color spectrum. 

"How did I not-"

"You were drunk, Rodney, it's okay," said Blair. "You just didn't see what was happening, with all of the blood."

"Next time somebody gets him drunk, they better tell me," said John, a slight pout sneaking out despite the frown as he leaned on a wall and stared at the floor. "I don’t like being left out when there's a party."

"Sounds familiar," said Blair, but the dig was accompanied by a smug smile.

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," said John. Rodney was still stuck on the tattoos. He looked to Derek, confused.

"How, with the tattoo? When you shift, it heals-"

"I have to kinda burn it in," said Derek with a shrug. "Like with open flames. Ronon helped with it when he got up here."

"Oh- no, I don't want to know," Rodney decided, shaking his head. Sheppard didn't either, as he cleared his throat and stood up. 

"Carson, anything else you need to get a picture of what's going on with this mess? We good to go once you've got this stuff?" he asked. Carson sighed and shook his head.

"Aye, Colonel. The computers have the hard work from there and I'll see what I have to work with later, the end of the week perhaps," he said. “It will be some time.”

"Thanks, doc," said John. He looked over the group like he was taking another headcount, because there were eight on his team now and Daniel made nine; it was a larger crew to keep tabs on. "Everybody find a corner today, get some distance from each other. See if maybe it's just cabin fever. We've got two rooms, we can shake up the bunk assignments if we need to."

"We got dibs on sleep," said Stiles, raising his hand. The kid was drowsily leaned back against Derek like he was asleep on his feet. Sheppard shrugged. 

"Sure, but Derek’s with Daniel until everybody settles down," said the Colonel. "So you'll have to clear that with them if you're expecting his help. And I mean it, there's _no_ sleeping with the communicator on."

Rodney nodded quickly; Stiles talked in his sleep and the last thing any of them wanted was to hear his voice blasted on a ship-wide comms channel. Stiles slumped and Derek patted him on the head to mess up his hair in a show of mock sympathy.

With everyone clear on the unit's instructions for the day, John grabbed Rodney by his jacket sleeve and they headed out. 

"If I find us someplace nobody will look for us, will you try to get some sleep?" John asked as they walked, headed in the vague direction of the lab Rodney had taken over. Rodney considered it, frowning, and not wanting to risk it. But John still looked run ragged. 

"Fine," he said. "But only out of _pity_. You look like you haven't slept in a week."

"I _haven't_ , Rodney. Did you miss the part where I just ordered medical intervention for my _entire team_ so we could _all_ sleep sooner rather than later?"

" _I'm_ fine," said Rodney. 

John nodded like he understood. "Only because you're an adrenaline junkie like the rest of us and your brain has trained itself to thrive on this kind of deprivation. The rest of us have nothing to do. We're _tired_." 

The logic made sense and Rodney rambled about how this meant everyone should default to being nicer to the Guides and if they really wanted to ensure a solid night's sleep, the Guide priority minus the blatant assholishness of the Project could be adopted. Except, as John promptly pointed out, they would all kill each other first. The idea didn't make it much past the arrogant gloating stage of the scientist who used adrenaline as brain-fuel but was admittedly running low after five days of it. 

And Rodney followed John to a Jumper in the 302 bay, where he closed them in and cloaked the ship. They raided the emergency supplies for a blanket so Rodney didn't have to lay down on the padded mats that were probably rarely swept out, and sacrificed their jackets as pillows. The engines weren't on, but the internal systems were, so they had a perfect seventy-three degrees and quiet. Even Rodney was asleep within ten minutes, John curled into his side and over him like a tangled up blanket.

*~*~*

**Pegasus Galaxy: The Daedalus**

It took a couple of days for Sandburg to calm down. Jim called it a prime example of what he had meant by saying the Sentinel and Guide relationship was mostly one-way; the Guides stood downhill from a whole landslide of crap while the Sentinel were usually climbing the hill to trigger it. Ellison and Sheppard had kicked a big dent in Blair's trust and Blair was the only one who could decide when that was repaired. There wasn’t anything John could _do_ about it, so he found himself avoiding it.

It was lucky McKay was more partial to his own life than he was worried about a court-martial, otherwise John would be battling the static of the Daedalus on his own. He got away easy, keeping Rodney company in the labs and distracting him with wormhole math rather than risk any heart to heart chats. John hoped their trust issues were ironed out on the prison planet they both hated because he didn't want to deal with dragging up exploding solar systems in pursuit of a Nobel any time soon. Instead, he napped on the couch in the lab with the computers and laptop stations, and waited until Rodney could sleep again.

The ride home promised to be otherwise uneventful and on schedule, which made Caldwell happy. He even let Sheppard back on the command deck when they got closer to Atlantis. Once the team was calmer again, John introduced Elizabeth to the new team on a vid call and talked her into sending him the daily briefs from Lorne. She said she would think about it, and an hour later sent over a batch from the past few weeks, but nothing current. John was still on medical leave, but he was determined to hit the ground running when he got home, and new faces on deck were a great excuse to catch up. It didn't take up a lot of their time, but it gave the guys an idea of who they would be working with.

Between Carson, Ronon, and Teyla, the new team got a crash-course in the who's who beyond names and ranks, and a head start on learning the workings of the city's rumor mill. 

_First lesson_ : Carson's the worst gossip on the ship. And John didn't have to utter those words once to get the point across. Carson made his own case just fine.

_Second lesson:_ Teyla _will_ find out anything that happens on the ship. And Ronon will help her.

_Third lesson_ : Sheppard's not going to question intel from those sources. Elizabeth Weir might, but that's her job according to the IOA. 

John tried to keep his opinions on the IOA to himself. Rolling his eyes when Daniel mentioned the IOA didn't count. He was a step further removed from them now, by the recent rerouting of the military control of Atlantis through the added buffer of Jack O'Neill. That alone would have taken great effort from both the General and Elizabeth, perhaps the moving of a small mountain, and John was still promised his job was waiting for him when Blair and Carson cleared him.

Blair had to help with a few SPRs thanks to the episode with his personal stress levels leaking out to the whole team. They didn't have anything conclusive from Carson on it yet, but it was decided - and agreed on by all members of the team - that he would monitor the whole group, the same way he had monitored John for the iratus retrovirus and then for the ProX on the way back to Earth. They had a relatively predictable environment on the Daedalus, and Carson for a control, and the only real unknown in all of it was the pair of werewolves. Who knew what lycanthropy was adding to the mix, but it was a part of it that they had to figure out. John wasn't ditching the kids, short of a court-martial at this point; he had dragged them in too far to abandon them, as long as being part of the team wasn't hurting them.

Against his better judgment, John did take Stiles to the labs when Rodney was working, because for some reason the kid didn't believe that Rodney’s entire job on the Daedalus and Atlantis both involved excessive amounts of math. He was on Rodney’s science team, and the kid was smart, but he was still too far out of his league to ever actually work with McKay’s lab beyond anything relating to technology. Even that, Stiles could only barely follow along. He was a kid. He had some growing up to do. And the labs would be replacing his junior and senior year of high school, at least.

After fifteen minutes of watching Rodney argue with every single member of the five-man team working on the 'gate-bridge idea, including Sam Carter via video conference, the teen came to a _surprising_ conclusion: Rodney McKay, in his element, was a sarcastic bully and a jerk.

"Yes. That he is," said John as they walked through the halls again, off to find absolutely anything else to do than listen to Rodney berate other people's intelligence. 

"This isn’t your fault?" asked Stiles. He seemed to be having a hard time aligning the Rodney he had met in the woods to the Rodney who was safe and cocooned in his more natural, technological environment. John shook his head and shrugged.

"Nope, _this_ is normal."

The kid still refused it. "Are you sure? People might like him better when he's getting laid."

The observation stopped John in his tracks and he actually tripped over his own boots. He caught himself quickly and recovered, but he caught Stiles by the shoulder and dragged him closer as a hint to keep his voice down.

"You’re not allowed to talk anymore," he decided. It wasn't an order, but he was sure as hell going to figure out how to put the kid on KP duty for it, even if they were on Caldwell’s ship. Stiles shrugged, not at all intimidated.

"What? You guys put way too much faith in those doors, that's all I'm saying," he said. He glanced up at John briefly. "Also, why d'you call him Mer?"

John huffed a deep breath and tried to remember all of Teyla’s breathing techniques for keeping his mood in line. He knew he was blushing but he refused to admit it. "I understand now. This is _exactly_ why nobody likes Sentinel."

"Remember all those times you told me and Derek to behave ourselves?" Stiles said, the easy tone now far too smug. "I'm not saying I counted, but... I did."

"Yeah, yeah. Difference is, _Caldwell’s_ not going to care about you two," John said, quiet and sober to reign in Stiles' joy in torment. "So keep it quiet, alright? Caldwell has DADT to deal with, and no other Sentinel on the ship. It's one thing to be in the clear on the books, but I'm under his chain of command. I don't know the Colonel's attitude on Project policies and I don't want to."

Comprehension dawning, Stiles nodded. "Got it."

"And don't say anything to Rodney," John added. Stiles nodded again.

"Fine, but what's Mer?" 

"His name," said John. "Meredith. And he hates it, so unless you want him to figure out how to say the name on your birth certificate, you probably want to forget it."

"Oh," said Stiles then. "So, not the French then."

"Nope," John told him. He was lying through his teeth, but the nosey kid didn't need to know that. 

"Colonel Sheppard, Director Weir's on comms for you," came a disembodied voice in John's head and he flinched before realizing it was the radio. "How far are you from command deck?"

"Thirty seconds," John replied, turning them around and doubling his pace in the opposite direction. Another hallway put them on the right course.

"That's weird, right?" Stiles asked. "The radio like that? I'm not used to it."

"Yeah, it's going to take some getting used to," John agreed. He got them to the command deck to find Rodney already there, standing beside Caldwell. Elizabeth's face was projected on a screen to the side, and she was bizarrely overshadowed by a bad picture... or something. 

"What’s going on?" Sheppard asked as he approached. 

"Atlantis is... having problems," said Elizabeth. It was her most diplomatic voice, the one she pulled out when Zelenka and Rodney started arguing about severity and timelines. "For about four days now, we've been having trouble keeping the lights on. And I mean that literally."

"And it's not the zedpm," said Rodney. "We still have years of power. Still want more, but... years. Zedpm is fine."

"Then what is it?" John asked, half to Weir and half to Rodney. The source of the shadows on Elizabeth's face became suddenly obvious as the camera shifted slightly and he saw candles around her. "Are you- are we on your _laptop_?" 

Elizabeth nodded. "We lost comms this morning. Radek's had to reroute the systems multiple times and we've had to relay this connection back through a setup on the mainland."

Suddenly the lights around her flickered on. She was in her office. "What the hell- _Radek_?" Elizabeth called out.

"I have partial power to comms!" John heard Zelenka yell somewhere off camera. "Still no lights in ninety per cent of the city. Basic life support functionality at forty."

"Jeezus," muttered Caldwell. "The place is falling apart."

"She's not falling apart," Sheppard said, stubborn more than informed.

"She's not being _reliable_ ," Elizabeth said. But she was in a fully lit room again. "We can't use the 'gate for more than radio communication and we have two teams out. They reported in and said they would 'gate to more friendly territory. All I can do is daily check ins in the meantime."

"How far out are we?" Sheppard asked Caldwell. The Colonel shook his head.

"Still ten days at least," he said. "We don't have the ZPM to cut it short."

"I have a skeleton crew here around the clock, trying to sort this out, but we've moved all non-essential and military personnel to the mainland. I have full faith in Zelenka and his team, but the temperatures in here are fluctuating too much, and who knows what else will surprise us."

"The naquadah generators aren't helping?" John asked.

"Not at all. When we switched power to the generators, there was a power fluctuation and the ZPM started taking power from them. Zelenka shut everything down for an hour trying to unravel that two days ago," said Elizabeth, shaking her head. "I don't know what is powering the lights now. I thought certain systems had been disabled-"

"They _had_ ," said Zelenka from somewhere near Elizabeth. "They turned _themselves_ on. Just now. I don't- I will send databurst when I have more numbers."

Despite himself, John sagged slightly, hand over his mouth as he stared at the screen. He wasn't sure if he leaned on McKay or if Rodney instigated it, but he could tell when Rodney stepped forward a bit, a hand on his back as the other pointed at the screen. 

"Everything. Send me everything. Not just the zedpm. Send me the data and then shut her down," said Rodney. "Just don't _touch_ anything else until I get there. If everything is powered down, she won't sink, for godsakes."

"That seems premature-"

"He's not suggesting abandon ship, Elizabeth," John said quickly, frustrated at her misunderstanding Rodney. "Just... to wait. If Zelenka hasn't fixed it in four days... you need more brainpower on the problem."

"Exactly," said Rodney. "Go camping for ten days. Or _something_. Just _stop touching_ buttons and crystals. Zelenka hasn't slept in four days and the man has approximately zero constitution for crisis operations."

Elizabeth frowned and looked off over the camera, presumably toward the scientist in question. Rodney shook his finger at her again. "Don't try to tell me I'm wrong, Elizabeth. Just tell _him_ to stop touching my ship and go sleep. _After_ he sends me the diagnostics."

"Ten days?" Elizabeth asked. Rodney nodded.

"The city's been around some ten _thousand_ years, right? Ten days to sort itself out without us won't hurt anything," he said.

"Okay," replied Elizabeth, taking a deep breath. "I was hoping one of the two of you would have some insight on how to get her running again. Not _this_."

"Only the command chair," said Rodney. "And you don't have the power to use it."

"They don't have anyone there who _can_ use it," Sheppard pointed out, quiet. Rodney grimaced and left it alone. But it got John thinking. They were going to have to get Stiles and Ellison comfortable with the Ancient technology a lot sooner than he had originally planned. 

Offscreen, Zelenka reported the diagnostic data had been sent. Rodney ran back to where his laptop was plugged in at one of the stations. 

"Got it! Okay. I'll go over it. Check in... give me twelve hours," said Rodney. "Check in again in twelve hours."

"Alright, we'll go shut her down, see if you have anything-" Elizabeth quieted as the lights turned off again around her. The candles were still going so they could still see her. She looked distressed and possibly heartbroken, and John figured he knew how she felt. "That's my cue. I'll see you gentlemen again in twelve hours."

And then she cut the connection. John turned away from the screen and Caldwell to look back at Rodney. "What the actual hell, McKay-"

"Your guess is as good as mine until I look at what Zelenka sent over," said Rodney, angry and shaking his head. "I'll just go see what I can find out."

"Yeah, you do that," said John, just as snappish as Rodney. He caught sight of Stiles staring at him, wide eyed. He had just dragged the kid across the galaxy, promising him a home in a fabled city, where the technology thought he was a god, and his first experience of the place was that the technology was breaking apart at the seams. Rather than try to spin positive on it, John pointed Stiles toward the door Rodney had left through.

"You heard the man. Now we go figure it out," he said. "That's how this works. This is the job."

"I should _not_ be on the science team," Stiles said, shaking his head as they double-timed it after Rodney and his laptop. Sheppard inwardly agreed because he wouldn't wish a boss like Rodney on anyone. But he was too distracted just then to chase off after idle arguments. 

John was going back to a dead city. He had been gone for a little over a month and everything was falling apart. All the stress of the last month, and Atlantis was maybe not going to be there waiting for him when he got back. 

John had lost sight of Rodney by then and he felt himself casting out his senses to look for him. The pull of a zone out was waiting on the edges as stress plied at the dials, and John broke into a run just to try to beat it. Atlantis _first_.

*~*~*


	49. Chapter 49

The numbers didn't make sense. None of the systems were registering any problems whatsoever. Zelenka had tested the electrical, the signals were getting through on a complete circuit. They had temperature control in the cafeteria and some residential units, but the hallways would not drop below ninety degrees Fahrenheit and the 'gate room and Elizabeth's office were only mildly better at eighty. The problem wasn't so much the heat, it was more the lack of airflow. With more people in the city, it would be stifling. 

Water and plumbing... well, they _existed_. There was plenty of free movement in the pipes, but most every faucet refused to turn on. The showers were gathering dust. Doors locked of their own volition, usually trapping people in the hallways, or out on the balconies. Once they evacuated everyone, over half the doors to the residences refused to open again. The city would let people out, but not let them back in. But there were no problems with any circuits, everything tested normal, all the crystals were operational, all power sources reported a full charge.

"It's in the code. There's something in the system triggering it," said Rodney at check in that night. "And we can't get into that without power to the command center, and we may have to put John in the chair to get at what we need to. Since the city locked our computers out of the system. The chair is the best backdoor we have."

"Lorne has the gene-" Sheppard began but Rodney was already shaking his head.

"Not enough to turn on a toaster. Gotta be you or Carson. Stiles maybe, sure."

"Well, Stiles isn't getting in that chair until I know he can handle so much as a Jumper," replied John. "Either way, that's ten days out."

"So. We go to the mainland in the morning," said Elizabeth on a sigh. "And hope the city lets us back in when you get here."

The lights were on over her head again, but once again, she had reported that they didn't turn on until her transmission. A twelve hour dark between the lights working was less than ideal to run a city. Zelenka was checking for energy spikes but so far nothing was responding at all. Just the lights in a few hallways and Elizabeth's office. The 'gate room was dark and had been turned into its own campground of sorts, with the technical team, or mostly all of them, down there snoring in sleeping bags.

"Look, prop a rock or something in the back door," said John. "And you can tell the city that I am not above taking a blow torch to the doors to get back in." 

Elizabeth rolled her eyes, which judging from the theatrical pout on John's face was the goal. Colonel Sheppard shook his head and sobered as he tried to play peacekeeper to the head-peacekeeper of Atlantis.

"It'll work out. It's just gonna be uncomfortable for a while... maybe stick the engineers on helping Halling build something that can see the mainland through some storms. We obviously need some _place_ we can evacuate to. It's about time we got our guys building something of our own over there anyway. Seems like every time something goes screwy, we're evicting the Athosians to make room for us. Now would be a great time to fix that."

"It's only ten days, John," said Elizabeth. "Building a solid city on the mainland would take longer."

"You’re proving my point, Elizabeth," replied John. "We need the resources, we're not abandoning Atlantis or the Athosians, so... somebody should check it out."

The Director curbed another sigh and nodded. "I guess I'll consider it while I work on my tan," she said. 

Rodney huffed and bit his tongue on reminding her to take sunscreen. Instead, he said, "Make sure Zalenka keeps the radar scanning. It's rudimentary without Atlantis, but he can still check for-"

"With what power?" came Zelenka's tired voice.

"Take the generators. Like it's hard?" said Rodney. "They're disconnected anyway. They're portable. Just don't break them."

"This is all very easy for you to suggest, from a working ship," retorted Zelenka.

"Well, I didn't break Atlantis, so I guess I don't have to suffer the consequences for another ten days," replied Rodney. The screen image jumped and they suddenly had a view of a keyboard edge and the desktop under it 

"Think ya made him mad," John pointed out helpfully. "He tried to hang up on us."

"Welcome to the future," replied Rodney, rolling his eyes.

By then, Elizabeth was back in frame, lips pursed in a disapproving frown as she looked off toward her office door.

"I told you he needed sleep. Everyone needs sleep. It's going around," said Rodney. "Just don't let him touch anything else until I get there. He'll get more sleep than I will."

"It's gonna be fine," John added, as a translation in case Elizabeth missed Rodney’s point again.

"Alright. Tomorrow we will check in from the mainland," said Elizabeth. The lights flickered over her head warningly.

"At least you'll have a few more hours of daylight on land," John said, squinting at the picture. _What the hell was wrong with Atlantis?_

But none of them had any further answers and it was three AM for Director Weir. And the next day she checked in from the mainland, just as a proof of life as a courtesy to the other two commanding officers of the expedition. Weir said they propped an exterior door open and left the shuttle bay doors open as they left the city. John promised that he knew how to break a window if the city figured out how to get sneaky on them to get around those safeguards.

He wasn’t accepting a dead city in the long term, and, truth be told, neither would Rodney. There was something hinky with the situation and the numbers Zelenka had sent him weren’t telling him everything he wanted them to. Something was missing, and he wouldn’t know what it was until he got on the ground. 

To save Zelenka headaches, they opted for data burst updates for the next few days, just to be sure the expedition was still intact, albeit relocated. It changed the mood of the homecoming but John was still the cranky bastard who swore at anybody who tried to give up before he did. Lt. Colonel Positive Motivational Poster. He spent half his nights following Rodney around, reporting idly on the day’s education of the new guys, between yawns. Languages, werewolves, detailed paperwork crap, Sentinel and Guide stuff that was a mixed bag when even Ellison and Blair said they were in over their heads with the ATA boost built-in for John and Stiles.

It all made for a busy daily schedule and even Stiles stopped complaining about six am wake-up calls once he was able to get sleep again. And Rodney did try to sleep at least five hours every night to keep everyone from bitching at him in the close quarters of a ten by fifteen foot barracks room.

Carson was monitoring the team but he didn't have enough data, at the same time as he had excessive amounts of data because there were a total of ten people to track, and finding any kind of commonality was going to take a while. He did narrow down that ATA wasn't a factor for the lycanthropy question, and nothing had miraculously infected Teyla or Ronon with an ATA relative, either. Whatever they were looking for, Carson said, would have to be shared among the Tau’ri at some point, but a few thousand years of genetics was no small puzzle to work out. And they were looking for something much smaller than a needle in a haystack.

All they knew for sure was that nobody was allowed to piss off Blair, or the werewolves, or abuse the sensory pain dials. It was a nice, easy list to get them through two weeks. It seemed like a fair policy for life on a tin can hurtling through space to begin with. There were only so many places to hide that didn't potentially end in disaster when certain areas of the ship reacted to the Sentinel’s _thoughts_ , which had already gotten Stiles banned from multiple zones. He was stuck to the buddy system, per Caldwell’s orders, and by the second week had to be accompanied by Carson, John, or Rodney whenever he wasn’t in their quarters or the cafeteria. Rodney noticed that, after that, John blatantly abused his and Rodney's limited access to the Jumpers.

*~*~*

“You’re kidding, right? That was days ago!” Stiles knew he shouldn’t have said anything. Sheppard just shook his head and rocked on his heels, smug. 

“Nope. You’re on KP. Hour a day, or until the crew is done with you. Rest of the trip,” the Colonel said. He nodded toward Derek, who sat clueless at the cafeteria table. “You, too. You get drafted in by default, the whole Guide thing.”

Hale blinked at him for it, blindsided over his cafeteria-steak. “What’d I do?” he asked. He looked to Stiles. “What’d _you_ do?”

Sheppard looked Stiles right in the eyes, one eyebrow hitched in challenge. “Stilinski needs to learn when to keep his ears to himself and his mouth shut. I figure this’ll give him some time to think on it. They throw us in the brig for that back on Earth, so it’s an important life skill.”

“I’m not on Earth, just for starters,” Stiles pointed out. Sheppard blinked at him.

“Sorry, what was that?” he asked. “Two hours, you said? Alright, two hours it is.” 

And that was how Stiles found himself on _pots and pans duty_ on the Daedalus, a spaceship, in _space_ , in another _galaxy_. With a very sourwolf scowling at him beside him, elbow deep in hot water because Stiles couldn’t get his hand near it without hissing in pain. There were noises and sounds and smells in a kitchen that Stiles wasn’t used to, and he definitely wasn’t used to them with hypersenses. There was an excessive amount of chopped onion left in one of the bins and even after a few hours sitting in the chill of the salad bar ice packs, it stung his eyes. And the texture and smell combo of the beans and meat mixture he was scraping into a garbage can was for some reason triggering his gag reflex.

“What the hell did you say to him?” Derek muttered at him.

“Might have asked him who Mer was, hypothetically, but I didn’t tell you that,” Stiles replied, carefully quiet, he hoped only loud enough for werewolf ears. Stiles ducked as Derek reached over to knock him in the head with a hand full of soap bubbles and hot water.

“Are you stupid? I figured it was because you asked where Hermiod left his clothes. God, Stiles,” Derek complained. Another pan plunked into the water as Stiles freed himself of the messy nacho failure.

“Hey! It was a valid question, okay? Everybody else around here has a uniform, I figured if they had a Gray on staff-”

“He’s not a Gray. _Asgard_ , Stiles. Stop being dense, I know you know this,” said Derek. And he wasn’t wrong, Stiles did know it, they had covered it with Sheppard and with Daniel Jackson both. But that didn’t mean that was how it had categorized itself in his head.

“Asgard are Grays. They’re, like, the whole reason we’ve got an Area 51- Oh my god, dude, do you think we can see Area 51? I mean, next time we go home,” he said. 

“I don’t _want_ to see Area 51,” said Derek. “You can go on your own.”

“Oh, right... I can see that going sideways. Good point,” replied Stiles. “Okay, dude, but. The naked guy. He’s an Asgard, right?”

“Don’t _even_ finish that.” Derek turned on him, eyes wider and jaw tense like when he tried to be scary. And once upon a time, Stiles might have been intimidated by it, but he knew what those teeth felt like with his _tongue_ , and at the moment, Derek was all splashed with water and soap bubbles, and the intimidation factor just wasn’t going to work. 

Stiles stared back at him and made a valiant effort at not laughing. “I’m just saying... no ass guard.”

Checking over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t being watched, Derek angled the pan in his hand to splash water back at Stiles. He tried to dodge it but he was laughing too hard and the front of his uniform shirt ended up just as soaked as Derek’s. The laughter caught the chef’s attention and he poked his head around the corner to squint at them. 

“Sorry,” Derek said quickly, tugging Stiles back to attention at his station. Stiles smirked at him, his sides hurting from trying to be quiet. Derek cracked a smile and then it was gone. He pointed Stiles toward the mop over against a wall. “Clean this up before somebody slips in it. Like me. Now. _Go_.”

“Your fault,” Stiles said, snickering but fetching the mop before Derek made another face at him. 

Overall, Stiles was pretty certain he wasn't supposed to be laughing when he was supposed to be working off a civil disobedience against a Lt. Colonel who was very much his boss even if Stiles wasn't military. And he didn't want to find out what he would be assigned as replacement punishment if the chef kicked them out. So he mopped the floor up and then went back to helping Derek prep and rinse things.

Sheppard showed up to personally retrieve them after two hours and the chef had nothing terrible to say about their help, so they were promised to return after the first dinner shift the next night. Derek scowled at Stiles for it.

"Does an apology buy us time off for good behavior?" Stiles asked as they left.

"Hell no," replied Sheppard. "You can suffer twice for that one. You run your mouth too much not to have earned it one way or another."

Stiles opened his mouth to argue but Derek grabbed the shoulder of his jacket and shook as a very strong hint.

"Did McKay tell you what I said to Hermiod?" Stiles asked. Sheppard noticeably shrugged the question off. 

"Nope. But I'm sure Hermiod's dealt with it before," he said. He shook his head. "It's a ship for god sakes. There's a dress code."

Stiles shoved at Derek's shoulder, completely vindicated. " _Told you._ "

And something as normal and boring and annoying as a sink full of pots and pans got added to Stiles' daily routine. Just like that. Along with coffee in the mornings. And nobody yelling at him, except to make him run at six in the morning, and nobody hitting him, except Teyla as she tried to teach him how to fight in the gym. They were things he agreed to, and actually got to have fun with. Nobody tried to kill him. 

Not even Daniel, and maybe he was an adult but he was still a brand new werewolf. The guy had a lot of control, considering his situation. Derek figured it was the meditation, since Daniel had done that for years. And he knew how to fight, and Daniel and Ronon were both actually teaching Derek things, so there was less "wild werewolf attack" and more coordination and less pain for him, too. 

That was something Stiles was learning from Teyla; how to take a fall without getting hurt, how to block and dodge and stay away from attacks. Those were things Derek had never had to learn, even though werewolves did in fact get hurt. Just because they could survive didn't mean they didn't suffer for it, and Stiles was stunned stupid to find himself _surrounded_ by people who understood that, for the first time in years.

Stiles was finding a lot of the things he had known in his friend groups back home hadn’t quite hit him right then, and that was amplified by the differences he saw watching the adults around him on the Daedalus interact with each other, or with Derek. They were rough, but they were pretty straightforward and direct, too. Nobody lied or covered stuff up around him. Teyla and Blair were the only people who were careful with Stiles, they treated him differently than the others. They asked questions, walked him through things step-by-step, and still let him know he was an idiot when he did something dumb. Teyla was just ridiculously more polite about it. 

They didn't ignore Stiles when he talked, either. Except maybe McKay and that was because McKay mostly ignored everyone who wasn't Sheppard, or sometimes Ronon and Teyla. And he was kind of distracted trying to figure out Atlantis' problems, and some wormhole math that five other math nerds couldn't figure out, either. Even when he got in his worst cranky scientist mode, Stiles was fairly certain Rodney wasn't going to have Ronon toss Stiles against a wall to shut him up. Maybe Stiles had a really low bar for friendship, but that counted for something.

Everyone else expected Stiles to just keep up. He had a few seconds of reaction time before he was supposed to follow orders, because he was a kid surrounded by military jerks. His dad hadn’t been one to enforce military anything at home, even when Stiles’ mom was alive and they weren’t just kind of scrambling to keep each other alive all the time. The only time Stiles’ dad would yell at him was when he deserved it, or when he was drunk.

Ellison, in contrast, barked loudly every morning at six am, or there was Sheppard or Rodney snapping at him when Stiles stepped out of line on the ship. When he snapped back at Sheppard for it once, the man stared at him really hard for a few seconds before he shrugged.

“Which would you rather deal with, me yelling at you now for doing something stupid, or you ignoring me and getting yourself or maybe even Derek hurt when we’re somewhere you don’t know, dealing with things that kill you?” he asked, not snapping that time. 

“The former,” said Stiles, reluctant.

“Then don’t get all emotional about it and _listen_. Remember how you said Scott stopped listening to _you_ and you got hurt for it? The faster you listen to us, the less we gotta yell,” the Colonel said. It wasn’t personal, it wasn’t drama, it was... life. 

Sheppard and Rodney argued more than Stiles and Derek did, the worst way of hiding flirting that Stiles had ever seen, but their drama never blew up on Stiles. And the one time Blair's bad attitude literally screwed with Stiles' head, it was an accident, not even his fault. Some stupid genetic thing that was as much Stiles' fault as anyone else's. 

Dr. Beckett was still working with all of them after three weeks to figure out the source of the weird... mood swings... from the Guides. Nothing was showing up and he was frustrated by it. But Stiles wasn’t going to overthink it. He had been around werewolves too much, he knew they picked up on crazy stuff that made Stiles crazy. Like an actual dog bringing home a dead squirrel, or finding shit and rolling in it. It made no sense and they did it anyway and it was maddening. 

He figured it was that same sort of disconnect with the Sentinel and Guides. Sentinel could smell or sense or see or feel things that didn’t make sense. No part of Stiles wanted to know when his friends were scared because he could smell their fear now. He could smell the adrenaline. He didn’t like it. Stiles’ personal theory was that the Guides had their own version of that going on, too. But since they didn’t have the rest of the sensory experience, nobody noticed. The Guides just unconsciously reacted to it.

When he asked Blair about it, the Guide nodded. “Sure,” he said. “That’s a huge part of it. It’s exposure, it’s familiarity. We kinda hold you guys as a priority, so there’s stuff we just do on autopilot, right? And maybe we cause our own anxiety because of it. I’ve got some numbers on this for you if you want them. I figure you’re not far off the mark.”

“Really?” Stiles asked, surprised. It didn’t sound like the man was just humoring him. 

“Yeah, really. It’s like a bad case of nerves that triggers a stomach ache, right? Or clenching your jaw causes headaches, and headaches can trigger migraines... our behaviors can cause physical symptoms, and just us being around you guys can change our behaviors the same way as with anybody else. You’re not far off. But it’s not quite covering everything,” said Blair. “It’s ignoring the weird stuff. Which is kinda funny, from you.”

“Fine, what weird stuff?” Stiles challenged. If Blair was going to call him on ignoring the weird stuff, Stiles could play Devil’s advocate and spin his weird stuff into normal stuff instead.

“Well, the weird stuff like, the insomnia hit Teyla and Ronon the same as it hit you guys, and they’re bunked across the ship from us,” replied Blair. “Sure, maybe Daniel has the sensory range that he was picking up on something from them, but where did they get it from? And what about the very well documented instances where the Sentinel is somewhere miles away, maybe even on another continent, and the Guide gets that same reaction, the nerves, the insomnia...”

“Or the _fire-alarm wrong_ feeling,” said Stiles. That wasn’t like anything he could attribute to even his panic attacks. Blair nodded.

“Right. There’s other components. There’s dreams, or nightmares, depending on what it is that’s wrong. It’s something that goes both ways, no matter what Jim wants to say. Guides have reported vivid dreamwalking, can recite something their Sentinel experienced outside of their presence in clear detail. There’s still _some_ connecting, common tie, Stiles. ” Blair shrugged and shook his head as Stiles felt his eyes glazing over slightly from the sheer amount of stuff he didn’t know. “And modern medicine and science want something they can prove, like the ATA and the ProX. Neither of which are present for the majority of Guides, at least not as dominant alleles. There’s... a lot to sort through on this stuff. Carson’s not going to have answers for a while.”

All Stiles had was a head full of dead end theories and none of the science to back it up so he left it alone. It was still bugging Stiles a day later when he joined the others in the big room with the mats that served as the ship’s gym. It wasn’t big enough to run around, with no real machines or weights to work with, but it was good for fighting. And that was where they spent at least an hour of their days because Sheppard wanted to know they could all defend themselves at least enough to run away. After a few weeks, Stiles was better, but Teyla could still take him to the mats in seconds. 

This time, Stiles sat on the sidelines, waiting his turn to have to do anything, while Teyla and Ronon worked with the sticks. It was something Stiles had seen dozens of times, and he had watched Ronon and Teyla both take everybody down. Teyla could take Ronon down. It didn’t make much sense to Stiles why the two of them sparred because they had such drastically different fighting styles. Teyla was controlled and fluid, graceful like she could slow down time, while Ronon used his size, speed, and strength to gain an advantage and exploit a weakness. 

But this time he was having a hard time getting at hers, even though she was all but telling him what it was with the deliberate, repetitive movements. Teyla showed Stiles how to take her down all the time, even talked him through the moves out loud, and it still never worked, just like it wasn’t working for Ronon. Then something struck him.

“She’s a Guide,” said Stiles, prodding Blair in the arm to get his attention. “That’s why she knew you were having trouble.”

“What?” Blair had been startled out of conversation with Daniel and was blinking to keep up.

“No ATA,” replied Daniel, looking around Blair at Stiles. “They’re Tau’ri but there’s still going to be slightly different genetic profiles...”

“Fine, but ignore the science,” said Stiles, impatient but keeping his voice he hoped was very quiet. He was still rusty about hitting the volume lately. “Look at what they do. They’re fighting, but they’re... completely coordinated, right? That’s what you’ve been telling us to do. They’re fighting and she’s meeting his style, keeps him level-headed, not charging and being crazy, keeps him out of trouble. They're so in sync, it's like they're one person."

“She’s the same with Sheppard and Jim though,” said Blair as he caught on. Stiles nodded.

“And me,” he said. “ _Sentinels_.”

Blair squinted at Ronon. 

“Knock it off, Stiles,” Ronon announced across the room. He missed a step and Teyla pressed and Ronon tripped without going down. He risked shooting a glare at Stiles for it. “You talk about people too much.”

Stiles stared at Ronon to make sure he wasn’t in any immediate danger, but he still backhanded Blair in the shoulder as an ‘ _I told you so_ ’ as Blair swore under his breath. There was no more discussion of Ronon and Teyla in the gym, but Stiles still took the story to Sheppard that night when the Colonel retrieved him and Derek from KP.

“I guess it would track,” said Sheppard, thinking it over. “He lost his planet years ago, and everybody says this stuff has a trigger. He was on his own outrunning wraith, and the guy can track better than anybody, no matter where we go. Maybe.”

“ _Maybe_?”

“What? So the guy can see and hear really good. I’m not gonna drag him into the Project or something,” said Sheppard, shaking his head. “If he could figure this stuff out without help, I’m not gonna nose in now. If he’s got some kind of Satedan version, that’s pretty fuckin’ cool because the rest of us haven’t noticed and he’s been with the team over six months. No Guide. I like _his_ version.”

As if to illustrate why, they stopped by the labs and got to witness Rodney in full mad-scientist mode, insisting that Carter had assigned him a team full of third-grade drop-outs masquerading as mathematicians. The man was exceptionally irritated and John had to insert himself into Rodney’s video conference call with Carter to shut it down and make Rodney stop for the day. He had skipped dinner multitasking between the ‘gate project and the Atlantis mystery and Sheppard was too close to sensing fire alarms to let Rodney work the night away on it. And Rodney dropped from anger into complaining with a touch, the same way Stiles could steal Derek’s attention with a hand on his arm. It worked for them, too, even if Sheppard complained about it.

It was one of those hundreds of weird little things Stiles had picked up about the crew he had fallen in with over the last few weeks. Being the _youngest_ person on a team sucked sometimes, but being _on the team_ was actually really cool. He was actual lightyears away from everything he knew to be home, but Stiles liked it. Even if he did have to share a room with five other people, who snored and stunk up the place, and ordered him around because he was a kid and they were military, and even Derek was certain he knew better than Stiles did about all things relating to his life. 

Stiles missed his dad for that, and he missed Lydia bossing him, and he missed Scott's mom. He sometimes missed Scott, but he had sometimes missed Scott when the guy was standing right next to him. And now, seeing how Daniel was working things out, Stiles figured that wasn't just the werewolves' fault. 

But things were better here. Derek had made him do something that was risky as hell, and it had somehow paid off. Even if the city they were relocating galaxies for did randomly break, and even if there were vampire aliens. If Stiles could figure out how to survive werewolves, he could figure out vampire aliens. Besides, Hermiod wasn't that scary. Wraith couldn't be _that_ bad.

It was still worth it to curl up to sleep at night with his face and his sides hurting because he had started laughing at something stupid and fun and not murderous, like Sheppard and McKay bitching at each other, or all of the times Derek had to glare him into shutting up because he was laughing too loud. It had been a few _years_ since things hadn't hurt, and Stiles was glad for the difference now.

Derek Sourwolf Hale had even started smiling more. And Stiles had started up a regular game of kissing the smile when he saw it. Somehow he had become dependent on sleeping every night with his forehead tucked against either Derek’s face, shoulder, or chest, too. It was the only way he could keep the volume of the ship around them down enough to sleep, by focusing on the difference between the sounds around him and the volume of Derek's breathing and trying to set the right range as normal.

The fact that Stiles considered anything to do with Derek as some kind of normal to his life was all kinds of astounding. But he did. And he curled around him like a monkey the second the blanket was up over their shoulders. He even slept the night through when everybody let him, with no nightmares to fight through. 

*~*~*


	50. Chapter 50

**Pegasus Galaxy: Atlantis**

There was absolutely no question as to who was flying the Jumper down to Atlantis. No one was stupid enough to even ask. John just inserted himself in the pilot's chair and turned around, inviting all challengers to take a seat somewhere else. Caldwell didn't even ask to send a pilot with them, which was nice of him. The Colonel had seen with his own eyes that John Sheppard hadn't been in the infirmary once in three weeks on his ship, and the only problem-child messing with parts unknown on his ship had been Stiles, the actual child. 

John was, according to Blair's most basic measurements, a week from being cleared. No zone outs in three weeks. He had stayed focused and alert and engaged, interacting with the interference of Ancient tech reading his system rather than fighting it. He kept his sunglasses on him, and his jacket, and ear plugs, but he hadn't needed them indoors since the first week on the ship. There was no way anyone was keeping him from flying.

His team, plus Carson and Daniel, crowded into the shuttle and mostly into the forward compartment to try to claim a view out the front. Derek and Blair somehow beat Stiles to the chairs, so he just sat on Derek, prompting John to have to be the adult and remind them that there was no rough-housing in the Jumpers. Rodney cast him a sideways look and John kept his eyes forward so no one saw either of them grinning about it.

They cruised by the mainland camp first, just to do a fly-by. They had checked in with Elizabeth the night before and she had promised to meet them at the city. John just wanted to snoop and see if Elizabeth had decided to share their engineers with the Athosians or not. He was satisfied to see multiple digs in process, and some land being cleared for lumber.

"They all look normal," said Stiles, apparently on alien-watch from Derek’s knee. 

"Of course they do," said Rodney, "They're Tau’ri like you or I."

"These are our expedition and Teyla’s people," John added. "And a few others we've offered shelter to over the years. One reason or another."

"Because apparently that's what we do now. Collect people, as if we don’t have enough mouths to feed," said Rodney. He was anxious to get back to Atlantis and investigate her busted-yet-perfect circuitry himself. John could practically see the man's fingers twitching, so he didn't point out that their newest human collections had been Rodney’s fault this time. In the grand scheme of things, it had been more or less a group decision in the end. "God I hope I don't have to go camping again after all this."

“Just means you’ve gotta fix the city before you sleep,” said John, as if that was no tall order. Rodney predictably spluttered.

“Zalenka couldn’t figure it out in a week, and you expect it in, what, twelve hours?” he demanded. John nodded calmly.

“I want my city back, Rodney. This is your thing, it’s what you do,” he replied. 

“Yeah, yeah. You shoot things, I fix things,” Rodney complained, slouching in the copilot’s seat in a very not-actually-copiloting way.

“Exactly,” said John, cheerful. 

The city showed up as sharp lines on the horizon otherwise blurred between ocean and cloudy sky. Stiles snuck forward, leaning carefully over the center console as he stared.

"You know, there was this handy _zoom_ feature that came with the whole Sentinel upgrade," John said, just a little smug. That "zoom feature" had already screwed him up plenty but he was starting to get the hang of it after a _month_. "You could have done that without blocking the view for everybody else."

"They can go around," Stiles replied.

"Just don't touch anything," said Rodney. Stiles stuck his hands in his pockets and crouched low so he had the closer look and wasn't blocking the view. Blair stepped up to crowd behind John, and Daniel wedged himself against the wall behind Rodney so he wasn’t in the way of Derek or Ellison.

"That's real, right?" Stiles asked as the city loomed large in the window. 

"Pretty sure. Otherwise Director Weir's got a helluva lot more to answer for than some wonky light bulbs," replied Sheppard. He took the long way around, cutting low through the city, weaving between buildings and under the sky bridges a few times.

"Try the control center Jumper bay," Rodney told him, pointing up and out of the maze Sheppard was lazily wending his way through. He wasn’t even showing off for once. He had just missed Atlantis and wanted to enjoy what he could of his apparently broken city. 

"The electric bill hasn't been paid in ten days, Rodney. The doors won't move," John replied. He started climbing back up toward the tower anyway. Rodney nodded.

"Yes, yes, but the thing is, until I see it doesn't work, for myself, all I have is a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet, so... prove it," he said. John rolled his eyes.

"I don’t think Zelenka and Elizabeth would have made this stuff up. You saw the settlement on the mainland. Those were all of our guys... full evac," he said.

"Colonel, can you define for me the scientific method?" McKay sighed.

"I certainly can, Rodney, and you can bite me," replied John, meeting his annoyance with a good mood he refused to let go of. 

"It's the systematic observation and measurement, and the formulation and testing, of working theories in an effort to solve a problem," Rodney said, talking over him. " _Observations_ being the key word. I need to see how far into the city's operations the problem goes. Humor me."

"Elizabeth said they left the bay doors open," John pointed out, grinning at the window.

"Then don't park on the pier!"

"I wasn't _going to,_ I just wasn't wanting to _park_ at all yet," replied John.

"Oh my god, you're gonna kill me..." Stiles grabbed the front edge of the center console to start beating his head against the back of his hands.

"Alright, alright, keep your shirt on," said Sheppard. He spotted the open bay doors and pointed. "There you go. Right in the front door."

As the Jumper lowered down, Stiles stood up, leaning further forward to look out and around the multi-level storage bay for the shuttles. John smiled as he looked over and saw Lorne and Weir standing near the nose of their parked jumper tucked away in the eerie shadows of an unresponsive Atlantis.

"I don't freakin' care if we don't have power," John said, mostly to Rodney. "I'm home. I'm staying here."

They parked and off-loaded without incident, other than Stiles tripping over some of the bags in his hurry to get at the gate. 

"Stiles! Grab a buddy!" Sheppard ordered.

"And _Don't_ touch _anything_ ," added McKay.

" _Ohmygod_ ," Stiles complained from the other end of the shuttle. John kept the door shut until Stiles had been leashed in by Derek, then let them all out, with Carson warning everyone away from the pile of luggage that no one was going to sort through until they knew if they were camping in the city or on the mainland.

When John stepped out of the Jumper, the city was quiet, none of the static from the last time John was there. Clear air and dusty smells. Too hot, even in the hangar with the overhead doors locked open. John could smell the ocean but not feel the breeze. He listened for the electric thrumming but heard nothing but the echo of the waves around the Jumper bay. If Atlantis was there, she was asleep. And John wasn't going to take the communicator off to test if the noise came back; he wanted to understand the energy from Atlantis, like he had understood it from the Jumper on the flight down. It just required the city _wake up_ first.

Elizabeth was all smiles as the missing crew spilled out, though she seemed surprised by Stiles. Hale had him by the hand and had to reel him in to keep him nearby, otherwise his attention was literally everywhere except on the group of people in the hangar.

"Welcome back, Colonel Sheppard," she said, with no small amount of relief. She looked at Rodney and added, "Or should I say, Colonels?"

"You should _not_ ," Rodney replied quickly. "Doctor, thank you."

Lorne looked uneasy about it. "Colonel, does this _really_ mean chain of command-"

"Orders from Rodney, yeah," said Sheppard, nodding. He looked around and caught Blair and Ellison’s attention, waving them over for introductions. "And, for the time being, Captain Jim Ellison and Captain Blair Sandburg are also next in line. Gentlemen, this is Major Evan Lorne. And Major, sorry for the confusion, but I'm still on limited duty until they say otherwise."

"Medical leave," Carson corrected him politely. "Not just limited duty, Colonel."

"My bad," said Sheppard, curbing a sigh. He had hoped he could get away with it. "So yes, Major, orders from Rodney."

The pair sized each other up in light of the new roles but seemed fine with it. Rodney chuffed and untucked his tablet. "Nice to be back, nice to see you all, pleasantries all around... Zelenka, show me what you did to my city," he said. The other scientist was already scowling at him.

"Don't you start, Rodney. I did not break the city," said Radek, as the pair walked briskly off toward the command levels. Sheppard waved the rest of his new team over, making sure Stiles didn't try to get involved with the scientists as an excuse to explore. 

"These are two more civilians to keep track of," he said as he made the introductions. "Though they're going to be assigned to training with some of the units to help get them up to speed eventually. And if you see Stiles in the halls, looking like he's getting into trouble, he probably is. High ATA. I expect problems until he learns to keep his hands to himself."

The teenager stuck his hands in his pockets at that. Lorne nodded acknowledgment but smiled and tried to be welcoming to the pair.

"I'm afraid unless Rodney and Radek have more luck than the rest of the team, the gene won't much matter," Elizabeth offered. "We did try getting a response from some of the members who have it, and the city did little more than let them into their quarters."

"They'll figure it out," said Sheppard. He flashed a smile and shrugged. "Besides, maybe she just missed me..."

"Uhm, maybe I'm new here, but I don't think that's how a _city_ works," offered up Daniel Jackson.

"We did fine, I assure you," said Elizabeth. She looked to Daniel, smile unwavering. "Good to see you again, Dr. I'm glad you were finally able to join the expedition."

"Thanks. It's only a temporary assignment, though. Just... so I can brush up on some notes. Help with the database research, if McMay will allow it. Or I guess I should say, if the city will allow it." Daniel rocked on his shoes, nervous, guessing from the subtle shift in the smell of the air around him. Daniel's _werewolf thing_ had been left off the books for obvious reasons, treated as a confidential medical issue that Daniel shared only with his friends in the SGC, because the last thing anyone wanted was for a member of SG1 to be whisked off and disappeared into Area 51 or something. Nothing had been noted in the file started on Derek, either. As far as John knew, even Landry was in the dark. So Dr. Jackson was in Atlantis for research on the Atlanteans and Ancients, and that was his cover story, per General O’Neill's blacklisting of the matter.

"Good luck," said Elizabeth. She definitely seemed tired and worn down by Atlantis being so temperamental on them the last couple of weeks. She all the same turned curious attention to the teenager and was probably about to prod him a little to narrow down why Sheppard was coming back with a kid on his team roster. John hadn't figured out yet how he was going to field that question. 

He was saved from it by Rodney’s voice echoing from the command center, "Colonel!"

"Excuse me," he said, running to see what was up. As John hit the hallway, the lights on either side of the door flickered to life. That was a good sign. If it had really been that easy, Zelenka was probably going to kill McKay. Brutally. In ways probably learned from other people Radek didn't like very much to begin with.

The same thing happened when John went around the corner into the 'gate room. John squinted as the stairs lit up under his feet.

"Rodney..."

McKay moved over to meet him at the stairs. "There's plenty of power. To everything. The city's just not working. Zero response..." His voice trailed off as he saw the lights, steady and clear. His jaw went slack.

"Which is what they told us..." said Sheppard. He looked pointedly at the lighted panels along his boots on the stairs. Rodney crossed his arms, looking from the gate room to the still dark control room. John's eyes bugged, too shocked at the suggested reality in front of them. Rodney looked annoyed, and Zelenka looked somewhere between wanting to faint and wanting to murder a laptop. 

"This can't be this simple," said John, looking down at his boots again and then up at the scientists. Rodney pointed him toward the control room.

"Go turn the city on," he ordered. John trotted quickly up the stairs the rest of the way and brushed by Rodney to get to the crystal terminals. Radek stepped back as the desk he had begun to situate himself at lit up when John dragged a hand over it. He walked to Weir's office and the lights overhead welcomed him. He checked the drawer of the cabinet behind her desk and found his gun where he had seen her put it. That went in his holster and he would apologize later.

"Are you kidding me?" John asked, walking back into the control room to find Rodney and Radek trying to set up their computers and get the city talking to them again.

"It's a city intended for the Lanteans. Their descendants. Perhaps you were gone too long," said Zelenka. "We have few with the genetic traits as strong. Yourself and Dr. Beckett. And I have not seen you in..."

"Two months," said Rodney. "And that's just the trip back to Earth. Longer, with the Daturans, and the stuff with... well, with Ford, just before that. So more gone than here for three months..."

"She shut down because there wasn’t enough Lantean blood in the city?" John asked. "Seriously?"

Rodney shrugged and then nodded. He pointed at the laptop screen in front of him. "The power current is the same throughout the city. The operations went dormant. Are _still_ dormant in ninety-nine per cent of the city."

John went to look over Rodney's shoulder at the screen. "Do we have comms yet?"

"Try it," replied Rodney.

"Stilinski, Ellison, get Ronon to show you to the 'gate room. Run," he ordered. Then he met Rodney’s eyes, nodded toward the computer. "You monitor the system? I'll go wake up the city again. Only took me a few weeks last time, and we know our way around now. If that's really what this is."

Rodney nodded but then shook his head. "It makes a certain sense. They're lucky the city didn't trigger some kind of self-destruct. Or put herself under water again. We don't have the power for it," he said. "But I'll go with you. Zelenka can monitor and radio us which sectors open back up. If you zone out... bad idea."

John smirked at him. "I was gonna take Teyla... get Ronon to take around the kid. Send Lorne to take Ellison. That's three zones covered out of five..."

"No." Rodney shoved the laptop toward Zelenka and scooped up his backpack. "We go."

John shrugged. They met their group, plus Weir, Lorne, and Carson at the base of the stairs. Elizabeth stared at the overhead lights, pleased, proud, and mildly offended. 

"Good work, Rodney!" she said.

Rodney frowned at her, thumbed at John's shoulder. "He did it. Just like when we first got here."

"Working theory is that the city went dormant, with no Lanteans left on site," Sheppard said. He nodded toward Jim and Stiles. "Assuming the ProX is a genetic throwback, the three of us should be able to wake her back up."

"Can we find another word that's less cro-magnon?" Jim asked, clearly frustrated by the term. 

"Genetic throwback to the people who built this," John clarified helpfully, waving at the gateroom which had obviously _not_ been built by a pre-stone age civilization. 

"How are we supposed to do that?" Stiles asked.

"You take a tour out to the edges of the city with Ronon," said Sheppard. 

"I am _so_ going with you," said Daniel quickly.

"That's it?" Blair asked. John shrugged.

"Maybe have a nice conversation, make a good first impression, don't break anything... the city is apparently paying attention to us," said John. He looked to Ronon. "Do a sweep out to pier four. Lorne, take Blair and Jim out via the armory. Everybody, keep in mind this place has been shut down for ten days, so no taking chances."

Stiles' visible excitement faded somewhat. "What about us?"

John blinked at him, then looked between Daniel, Derek, and Ronon. Then he looked back at Stiles. "You'll be fine."

With a final reminder that the comms system was back online for all of them, John sent them off. Elizabeth and Teyla ran up to help Zelenka monitor the city maps and systems. And John and Rodney went to explore the city. They stopped by the shuttered infirmary with Carson, then left the rest of the surrounding sections to him to wake up, up and down stairs and all.

After a few hours of checking the residences and the labs and the hallways and the storage rooms, they got the usual high-traffic corridors back open for business. John was energized and home, thinking requests at the city and having them answered, tapped in and ready as if he were sitting in a command chair. He was focused for the first time in a month, clearing rooms and hearing the city rattle and roll and power up around him. 

And Rodney was thoroughly annoyed with Atlantis for the fact that she had kicked the expedition out in the first place. The genius seemed to have forgotten the fact that the entire expedition only got the green light after Sheppard was stupid enough to sit his ass in the command chair. The higher ups knew back then that they needed more people with the gene in order to risk the gamble on the technology the expedition was going to be faced with. Out of two hundred, they had started with thirty, but some were recessive and could only activate the tech if they had received the therapy, like Rodney had. Fast forward two years, and there was Rodney again, very loudly contemplating hacking the Ancient coding to disable the technology they had shown up for and threatening the city's built-in security loophole in the future. 

"Leave it alone, Mer. We just make sure somebody stays here. Carson's usually here. The city wants her people, so we just make sure she has them," said John.

"What happens if you get reassigned?" Rodney asked.

"Aside from mutiny, at this point?" John replied with a shrug. "I'm gonna call this _job security._ Whoever they assign here has to be capable of keeping the lights on."

"Yeah, well, your job security negates mine," said Rodney unhappily. John rolled his eyes.

"It does not. Other stuff still breaks. And the problem of the wraith that the Ancients couldn't even figure out... nobody even _wants_ your job, Rodney," John pointed out. "Nobody intelligent enough for it, anyway."

They had finally made it out to the piers. Outside in the fresh air, with the sound of the ocean and Rodney's complaining the only things John had to keep track of. Rodney seemed to want to go back inside, but John caught his jacket sleeve and tugged him along, out to the edge of the ship. When he sat down, Rodney mirrored him, tablet tucked safely behind them away from the occasional spray of the water. They didn't have beer or coffee, but it was good enough.

"Sheppard to Ellison, what's the status?" John asked over the comms.

"Is this place real?" Stiles' voice came over the radio instead of Ellison’s. 

"Yep, still real, Stiles."

"The piers need guardrails then. Somebody could fall in, or off, or whatever," said Stiles. In a roundabout way, he had answered the question John would have asked him, given that they were outside. Stiles likely wouldn't have been quite as awestruck by the city if all he had seen of it was dark corridors.

"There are no guardrails because it is a spaceship, not actually a pier," said Rodney. "And you aren't supposed to be playing on the edges of ships. Stay away from the edge of the ship!"

"Wait, really?" Stiles asked.

"Oh my god," muttered Rodney, head in his hands. John smirked at him.

"Captain Ellison, check in," John repeated.

"Sorry," Stiles added automatically, and John had to stifle a laugh as Rodney rolled his eyes.

"Colonel, the lights are on out here. We're going down a level, starting a new grid," came Ellison’s voice then. 

"Can we do that?" Stiles asked.

"We'll do that," replied Ronon. 

"Good call," said Sheppard. They were going to have to teach Stiles some radio etiquette but in the meantime it would be entertaining. "Then head back. We need to get to the mainland for dinner, probably start bringing folks back in stages. I'll check with Director Weir on that one. Stay out of trouble, alright?"

"Copy that," said Ellison, as close to amused as Sheppard had heard him yet.

"Yeah, copy," said Stiles. Next to him, Rodney mimed throwing his radio in the water 

"Why. I don't like kids. Why did I agree to keep that one," Rodney muttered. 

"Your luck stepped in on it, I think. You're stuck with it," said John.

"What’s with the military and superstitions?" Rodney asked. "You keep saying I've got luck, but I assure you, my recent and extended past would suggest otherwise. I am not an ideal good luck charm, John."

Rodney shook his head as John shrugged, studying him. He dug into the backpack he had confiscated from Rodney hours earlier and fetched him a power bar and the canteen. 

" _I say_ it's luck," he said, handing over the food. "And probably yours. Mine tends to get me locked up and court-martialed."

"Serbia and Antarctica were not exactly a picnic, either one," said Rodney.

"But that's my point, Mer. They got you _here_ ," said John. "And every time we leave here, you and me, we make it home. That's lucky enough."

Rodney looked over at John then, met his eyes and didn't skitter away to hide a blush or argue. It wasn't something Rodney did much, he wasn't comfortable with it, but he locked on to John this time. Then he nodded, dropped his attention to John's hand, and laced their fingers. 

John lifted their hands to kiss the back of his knuckles, just over the blue and black fragmented tattoo that he didn't hate so much anymore. It matched Atlantis and it matched Mer's eyes, and there was no separation between them for him really. John fought for both, would keep them both, because he was a stubborn, possessive bastard, and Atlantis was home because that's where Rodney would be.

"Yeah, we make it home," Rodney said. "I like it here."

*~*~*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *~ **The End** ~*


End file.
